


What You Might Have Been

by homosociality



Series: the mind and the body [1]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-05-09 11:51:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 66,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14715509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homosociality/pseuds/homosociality
Summary: Spencer Reid, with his four PhDs, is a little late in joining the BAU, but he integrates well, even if he is oddly secretive about his personal life. All the team knows about him is that he has a son he dotes on, and every now and then Spencer walks into work like he’s on cloud nine, though he never introduces the mystery girlfriend/boyfriend making him smile like that to anyone.Until the team is sent on a case where they quickly learn that the string of murders they’re investigating is not what it seems. And that’s when a tape of their lead suspect being tortured arrives at the BAU. It turns out that Alan Hartsfield is actually an undercover FBI agent who’s been working to infiltrate the Via Maris trafficking ring--until the BAU showed up and started casting doubt on his supposed crimes. And that his name is really Aaron Hotchner, and he’s Spencer’s husband.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "In life there are meetings which seem  
> Like a fate.”--Owen Meredith

MORGAN  
Elle didn't last long after she got shot. It hadn’t even been a particularly bad wound, just a .38 clean in-and-out over her hipbone after coming out onto the landing at an inopportune time when Morgan had been trading shots with Garcia’s worst date ever, but for all that she was back at the BAU on light duties three weeks later, there was something cold and bitter and irrevocable in her eyes now. The physical wound had only been the gateway for something much more serious, a crack in her moral fortitude, a chasm opening up in her mind.

It didn’t help that her first case back had been a bad one. Three missing girls, then a body, then a fourth, plus five dead girls thirty years ago on a case that was never closed. It wasn’t as though Elle needed any more proof of all the terrible things men could do to women, not after what they’d just been through with Garcia, or a reminder of the sheer endlessness of it all. Kill one murderer, his son pops up twenty-seven years later to take his place. Days spent picking up body parts and watching the lines around Elle’s eyes grow tighter and tighter until someone wound up dead.

There was no doubt that Chrissy Wilkinson had shot and killed her husband--though there was considerable doubt over whether it had in fact been self-defense or outright revenge--but the glances Gideon and Rossi had given each other while Elle, holding an icepack to her head haphazardly like she hadn’t actually noticed the pain, repeated her story about the heavily pregnant woman striking her on the head and taking her gun for the fourth time, sounding falser and angrier each time, spoke volumes. Morgan didn’t say anything when, back at Quantico, Gideon took Elle into his office, Rossi following them in after enough time had passed that Elle had let her guard down. He just put his feet up on the vacant desk next to his and settled in for the long haul.

Prentiss lingered beside him. “What do you think they’re talking about?”

Prentiss knew _what_ they were talking about--Elle standing over Charlie Wilkinson’s corpse, claiming that his wife had blitzed her, that she’d staggered upright and chased after Chrissy but hadn’t made it in time--she was really asking _what next_ , which Morgan, though he had his suspicions, couldn’t answer. “Go home, Emily,” he said instead. “Get some rest.” Tomorrow was going to be a long day, he could see the outlines of it taking shape already: debriefing both new victims, filing to close a decades-old cold case, the exhaustive wrongful death investigation that came when a murderer fell at the gun of an FBI agent, regardless of whether or not she’d been holding it (and maybe she had been.)

Prentiss surveyed him for a moment, then nodded. She wasn’t as hot-headed as Elle. Even with one hand on the back of an unsub’s neck, she was always watchful, assessing; Morgan appreciated that about her.

“Let me know what she says,” she told him before she grabbed her go-bag and left. Morgan found it in himself to crack a smile. Couldn’t get anything past that one.

The voices in Gideon’s office got louder, angrier. Morgan reached for an AAR and started to fill it out. No point in wasting valuable paperwork time. He tapped his pen against his lips, wondering what was the most politic way to phrase, _I think my colleague may be an accessory to murder_.

They were in Gideon’s office for forty minutes. When Elle stormed out, her face was flushed, hair wild from where she’d run her fingers through it. She beelined for her desk and started throwing her knickknacks and photos into her go-bag.

“What’s the news?” he asked as gently as the situation would allow.

“I quit.”

Morgan nodded. He’d been expecting this. Gideon, ever the optimist, would’ve been talking about a performance improvement plan, additional oversight, temporary measures. Elle was proud, though. She’d never have consented to any kind of action plan where she’d have to admit she was in the wrong. Not about this.

It wasn’t that he didn’t understand. It was just that he couldn’t pretend that what had happened in Fredricksburg--hadn’t. None of them could. Elle hadn’t just crossed a line, she’d hurtled over it and showed no sign of rejoining them on the straight and narrow. When they started viewing the law as rules to get around instead of pillars to uphold, they became no better than the people they’d devoted their lives to catching.

And maybe part of him didn’t understand, after all. Elle wasn’t the first agent or cop he’d ever seen to face personal injury for the first time and fold under the pressure. It was every time a blow, though, and baffling. Morgan’s own body was a battering ram, nicked and dented in service to the cause. What was a bullet hole or two between profilers?

Or, he thought with a sigh, a lie or two between colleagues?

“Elle, you couldn’t’ve thought they would just ignore it.”

She slammed the photo of her father she kept-- _had kept_ \--at the corner of her desk down hard enough that Morgan could hear the glass crack. “Ignore _what?_ ” she snapped, which was a trap, because Morgan couldn’t say it, because the moment he said it he had an obligation to report it. So he said nothing. Elle resumed her furious packing. “You all think I let Chrissy kill her husband--” _Or worse_ , Morgan thought, “--but why do you even care? He was a rapist and a murderer! He abducted and tortured girls for no other reason than because he was a bland little bottom-feeder looking for identity!”

“We don’t make that choice.”

She scoffed. “Don’t act so high-and-mighty with me. I know what you’re thinking when you pull the cuffs just a little too tight on a suspect.”

“It’s not the same.”

“It _is._ The difference is, Gideon and Rossi--the whole team--they have _your_ back. In an way you don’t have mine. Maybe none of you ever did.”

“That is _not fair,_ Elle,” Morgan said, hurt, a little stunned. How had this gone from being about her mental soundness to the BAU?

Elle’s pretty face twisted in disgust. “I thought you, of all people, would understand.”

Morgan felt a hot chill creep down his back, the slightly queasy feeling he always got when he thought that someone might be looking at him at thinking about Carl Buford. “And what’s that supposed to mean.”

“You know--Garcia!” A wave of relief that she wasn’t thinking of him as a victim washed through him, then a hot tide of rage boiled up. “You know what she’s been through. You _know_ what’s out there. Why aren’t _you_ angry? Why aren’t you _furious_?”

“Don’t you _dare_ lecture me about what happened to Garcia,” he snapped.

Elle withdrew. She looked down at where her grip was cold and white on the frame of her father’s portrait. Something like sorrow crossed her face for a moment. Then she packed that away, too. “Yeah,” she said. “If only you stood up for me like that.”

Their eyes met as she opened the bullpen door, something quiet passing between them as they recognized that they wouldn’t be keeping in touch, not after this. Not after she’d so thoroughly disowned the BAU, which beat in his blood like he’d been born to it.

Even that last moment of solicitude seemed tinged with frost, though. For all that Elle burned hot, something bitter cold lingered about her now.

She couldn’t stay with the FBI, not after quitting like that, no transfer request, no time to let the gears of paperwork turn and take her away. Maybe she’d get another job in law enforcement--Metro PD, perhaps, or maybe she’d go back to Seattle or New York. Morgan hoped not, not out of much concern for whatever rapist and murderer that would cross into her sights next, but out of a lingering well-wishing for Elle. What had happened in Fredricksburg would only happen again. Next time, it could be her career on the line. Or worse--next time, it could be the BAU coming to take her in.

Morgan looked back at his AAR and wrote, _We heard the gunshot, but by the time Rossi and I arrived on the scene, the suspect was already dead. No outside involvement indicated._ One last gift to a once-friend. He signed in his usual clear, sloping hand. Gideon’s office door was still closed; he and Rossi were shadows moving against the blinds. Probably having a nightcap of the good scotch Rossi kept in his desk drawer for days like this one.

Morgan packed himself up and went to Garcia’s. It was two in the morning, but she’d be awake; she still wouldn’t sleep without him there with her.

It had been one month since she was shot.  
  
  
  
For the rest of the year, the usual high-traffic stream of serial killers and assorted scum dwindled to a trickle. There was an arsonist in Lubbock, Texas, around Christmas, but other than that it was all consults and wrap-up work on previous cases. Clooney was actually seeing more of Morgan than of the dogsitter. It was weird, but nice.

But what the BAU lacked in cases, it made up for in interpersonal tension. Gideon was being his usual intensely private self. Rossi was more forthcoming, but even he limited his commentary to, “Elle hasn’t been the same since… what happened to her happened to her. She thought it would be best to leave now, and we accepted her resignation.” Prentiss had said nothing, just lingered a little longer at Elle’s empty desk than usual. JJ had been stunned, but she was a diplomat at heart. Garcia, bless her heart, was not.

“I just don’t understand why she wouldn’t even say good-bye,” she kept saying, her voice strung tightly enough to quaver and break. “I just don’t understand.”

No one wanted to talk about Elle leaving. Definitely no one wanted to talk about replacing her, even though they were going to need an extra body when the caseload picked up again--not to mention for the custodial interviews, witness briefings, profiling workshops, or the PR busywork the Assistant Director sent down now and again like recruitment pitches or guest lectures at local universities. 

One Wednesday there was a stick-thin kid perched on an ottoman in the waiting area outside the bullpen. Morgan gave him a passing glance, but he had forty minutes before he had to be at the Sherwood Institute for the Criminally Insane to brief a witness, so he didn’t spare him another thought. Times like these, you found yourself almost craving a case.  
  
  
  
GIDEON  
His name was Spencer Reid.

Dr. Reid, given the PhDs. Four of them. He hadn’t been at the FBI long--just graduated from the Academy, in fact--marksmanship average, remediated for several physical requirements, but his test scores were off the charts. Had experience with forensic linguistics--that was a particular plus, they hadn’t had anyone who specialized in psycholinguistics since Wells had transferred out, Prentiss’s BA in literature was currently the most the BAU was packing in that department--handwriting analysis, geographical profiling… it was like he’d been molded to fill every one of the gaps in their collective skill sets. Tie was crooked. Someone else had applied his cologne for him. Nervous, but aware of his tells and purposefully not tapping his fingers or jiggling his leg. Played chess.

Gideon surveyed Reid over his glasses and tried to picture him in the field, in the conference room, in an interrogation room, with the team. Good on paper. But did he have it--the creativity--the mental flexibility to grapple with the most esoteric delusions and come out the victor--to, as Morgan might have phrased it, think outside the box--the empathy, too, everything about him suggested a socially awkward man who would struggle to build rapport with offenders, witnesses, and victims. Everything except that cologne. And the faint marks on his fingers. Faded marker.

A puzzle.

“So, Dr. Reid,” he said. “Three degrees in mathematics, chemistry, and engineering. Why’d you come here to study behavior?”

“I, uh, well,” he blushed, “I always wanted to join the FBI.”

“But you could’ve applied to the Academy after that first PhD. Eighteen-year-old genius, they’d have snapped you up in a heartbeat. Why get three more degrees before applying?”

“I just wasn’t ready just yet,” he admitted, an abashed smile on his face. “So I got the other two degrees, moved here. It was sort of like a test run, studying psychology in DC… making sure I really wanted to be here, and it wasn’t just a childhood fantasy.”

“Conscientious of you.” Gideon folded his hands together. “But you only answered half of my question.”

“I’m… sorry?”

“The first part was why here. The second part was why behavior.”

Reid paused, a good sign. Only sociopaths had a ready answer for every question. “When I was little,” he said slowly, “I could understand anything. Except other people. I could never figure out how to… get acceptance from my peers. And it drove me crazy. I started to study behavior because I wanted to understand this thing that other people take for granted. Why people do the things they do.”

Well, well. Empathy. Gideon smiled at him. Rossi’s clipped military knock interrupted. Gideon rolled his eyes. Dave had been put out that Gideon had wanted to interview the candidates alone. Of course he’d find a way to weasel into this interview. Still, he called, “Come in.”

Dave poked his head in, but he was preoccupied with some files he was leafing through. He gave the office a cursory glance, lingering over Reid with only a hint of curiosity. 

“I got a call from the Philly field office,” he said. “They’ve got a box of materials they’re concerned could point to an unsub. Do I have your permission to go check it out, fearless leader?”

“What kind of materials?” Gideon asked, the beginning of a brilliant idea blooming.

“Don’t know yet. Sounds like it’s some porn, some written materials--letters, journal entries, you know the type of thing.”

“Dave,” Gideon said deliberately, “this is Dr. Spencer Reid. Reid, David Rossi.”

Reid nearly knocked his chair over in his haste to shake Rossi’s hand. “It’s so great to meet you, sir,” he said, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet. “I’ve read all your books.”

“Thank you,” Rossi smiled that warm, winning smile he saved for his fans, but turned a quizzical look on Gideon, obviously wondering why his perfunctory check-in to pursue a personal lead had turned into a meet-and-greet.

“Dr. Reid,” Gideon explained, “is interviewing for the open position. It occurs to me that as he has some experience with psycholinguistics and handwriting analysis, he might accompany you to Philadelphia and help with the evaluation.”

“I’d love to!” Reid blurted out.

Rossi opened his mouth, closed it. Presented with the full puppyish force of Special Agent Reid-- _Dr._ Reid, he corrected himself, might as well get into good habits--he’d folded before he could even begin to stage an argument, as Gideon had suspected he would. Possibly that might work as an interrogation technique.

And look at that--Rossi would get an opportunity to form his own opinion of the candidate after all.  
  
  
  
ROSSI  
Aside from being unit chief, there was a reason why Gideon did all the hiring for the BAU. That keen profiler’s eye had a talent for picking out the cleverest, the hardiest, the ones who would be truly incredible profilers out of a field chock-full of potential greats. It wasn’t unheard of for him to pluck a new Academy graduate from the fold and train them up, through basic interrogation techniques and the advanced psychoanalysis the BAU was famous for alike. The last rookie Gideon had latched onto had grown up to be SSA Derek Morgan.

So it wasn’t that Rossi didn’t _trust_ Gideon’s decision to send the greenhorn out with him. It was a low-stakes way to see how the candidate would fare outside of the classroom, out in the big, messy world. It was just--

“--and I always wondered why, on page 89 of _Frenzy,_ you describe Malvo and Muhammad as ‘a typical dominant-submissive couple’ when in _Compulsion_ you almost seem to question the entire framework of dominance and submission with regards to the universal motives of power and control, for example on page 214, ‘Do not make the mistake of thinking that dominant and submissive killing partners are akin to healthy relationships. The submissive also craves power and control, and usually finds some kind of psychological sense of stability in their personal lives through their relationship--'”

The kid had more questions than a trivia contest, and he hadn’t slowed down enough for Rossi to even begin to answer a single one. Rossi had been watching him carefully out of the corner of his eye and was doubtful whether he’d even stopped to breathe the whole two and a half hours to Philly.

Also, he seemed to have memorized Rossi’s books word for word? Rossi was bewildered. Flattered, but bewildered.

Reid wasn’t his only problem. Agent Jill Morris was brisk and hungry--the assessing look she gave him when he shook her hand, the carefully-kept plaques and commendations on the wall, the lack of personal photos on her desk or shelves, the way she sold the case like she was shelling for a car company, _You won’t be disappointed,_ the way she’d contacted him directly instead of submitting the case through JJ. All of it pointed to a woman whose ambition was her _raison d’etre_ , whose sharpest skill had always been her keen eye for which way the wind was blowing. Rossi knew the type.

Talking to Jill Morris was uncomfortably like talking to his twenty-eight-year-old self through a mirror, all slicked hair and sharp-cut clothing, sure that all rules could be bent in the service of the greater good. It was discomfiting.

Reid did turn out to be a help when the single box of papers Rossi had been expecting turned out to be eight boxes stuffed with hardcore pornography spanning decades and meticulously detailed murder fantasies. “I have an eidetic memory and can read up to 20,000 words per minute,” he announced cheerfully.

“Good. You take the porn,” Rossi said with no guilt at all.

It still took them about six hours to go through all of it, with Rossi lingering over the prose, searching for clear evidence of precursor crimes or a telltale switch in tense. Reid was impressive, at least in this relatively insulated and uncomplicated endeavor--bursting with insights about the square block handwriting, the syntax, the level of education on display. Rossi still wasn’t totally convinced that he could stare down an unsub in an interrogation room, but he would have loved to have Reid attached to the team as an analyst alone.

Deviant, but not, beyond reasonable doubt, a murderer, he concluded to Jill. She pulled out a hair sample. Rossi folded.

“Look,” he said to Gideon, “the team’s not on a case right now, and this guy… if he really has moved on to enacting his fantasies, it won’t be pretty.”

“Do we have a confirmed victim?”

“No,” Rossi admitted.

“Then we don’t have a case. Dave, you know it’s nearly impossible to build a profile without victimology--”

“’I think about hogtying it and butchering it like I’m going out on the hunt.’ ‘Smash her face. Subdue her so that she cannot scream for help. Show her who’s in charge.’” Gideon fell silent. “Torture fantasies like this--if he _has_ killed, one wouldn’t have been enough. He’s only going to escalate, and it will be ugly. There are eight boxes of this, Jason. If he’s done even a fraction of what he’s written about…”

“Find me a body,” Gideon said, more gently, “and you’ll have a case.”

Rossi sighed and signed off. Stubborn old stickler.

“What did he say?” Reid asked, puppylike in his eagerness.

“He wants me to find him a body,” Rossi said, weary. The problem was that there was plenty of research on disposal methods like quicklime and incineration here; every missing persons in the state? Every suspicious murder? They couldn’t look through them all.

“I think,” Reid said, “I can help with that.”  
  
  
  
PRENTISS  
When the team trooped into the Philadelphia field office, there was a momentary stumble after Morris introduced herself but seemed to take for granted that they knew the skinny kid hovering over Rossi’s shoulder.

Gideon trundled over from where he’d wandered off to look at the burgeoning evidence boards. “This is Dr. Spencer Reid,” he said. “He’ll be joining us for the duration of this case.” Reid waved shyly at them.

“Doctor?” Morgan asked, eyebrows nearly climbing off his face. “No offense, doc, but where you’d get your degree, kindergarten?”

“Degrees, plural, and I have three from Caltech and one from Georgetown,” Reid, who was _apparently a prodigy_ and thankfully didn’t seem offended, said. That was Morgan told. Prentiss covertly stepped on his foot anyway.

“You can all get to know each other later,” Gideon said, sounding rather like a harried teacher. “Dave, brief us on the victims.”

“Garcia found four in PA and surrounding areas,” Rossi said grimly. “Signature electrical burns show evidence of torture, and the bodies were dumped naked.”

As if one, they clustered towards the evidence board. Only Morgan and Prentiss stayed behind. “Ow,” he said mulishly.

“If he turns out to be Elle’s replacement, is this really the first impression you want to make?” she hissed back before rejoining the rest of the team-plus-one.

If this was Elle’s replacement, Prentiss didn’t know what to make of him. It was Reid, it turned out, who had identified a signature concrete enough to justify them coming onto this case by noticing how heavy and excited the unsub’s handwriting became when writing about electric shock in particular. He was a seemingly endless fount of statistics--number of electricians in the city, number of missing women in the age range between 2003 and 2008, past incidences of comparable serial crimes.

That, at least, was like Elle. She’d liked her statistics, too. Was shy about drawing conclusions, though. Aside from when it came to sex crimes, she’d always acted as though she were the student and the rest of the BAU were dispensing heavenly wisdom--even Prentiss, who was her junior, but who’d had to project confidence to secure a real place on the team in spite of Strauss’s manipulations.

Maybe Reid would like to go out with her for Cuban food like Elle once had, too.

“Hey,” she said after Morris gave an totally unauthorized press conference that completely obliterated their ability to get any more work done, “Morgan and I are going to go find a shitty diner and talk over the case, just to get a change of scenery from FBI office chic. You want to come?”

He smiled at her. It was surprisingly warm. “Okay.”

The Press Fiasco was fresh on everyone’s minds that night--if JJ weren’t trying to put out that fire, she’d certainly have quite a bit to say on the topic--so that was what Morgan complained about through the first ten minutes of their dinner. His focus turned to Reid about when their greasy-spoon dishes were being set down in front of them.

“So,” he said over a glistening pile of sausage links, “how long’ve you been in the Bureau?”

“Uh, two weeks,” he said, fiddling with a napkin. “I graduated from the Academy two weeks ago.”

To her surprise, Morgan just nodded. “Gideon pulled me fresh out of the Academy, too. Guess he must’ve seen something in you to make it worth it.”

“You never told me that,” Prentiss said, astonished.

Morgan grinned at her. “Come on, how old do you think I am? I’ve been with the BAU for six years and was Chicago PD before that, where exactly do you think I found the time for entry-level grunt work?”

“You’ve been with the BAU for six years?” Reid asked, interest piqued.

“That’s right, kid, so come to me for any questions and/or concerns,” Morgan postured. “Prentiss here has only been here one.”

She rolled her eyes at him. Reid looked down at the napkin he’d been unfolding and refolding. “Is it always so…”

“Yeah,” Morgan said sympathetically. “Yeah, it is.”  
  
  
  
Reid, it turned out, had one third of a geographical profile (”You do geo-profiling too?” Morgan had asked, amused. “Is there anything you don’t do?”). This became problematic very quickly when Morris was abducted the next day.

7:20 PM and Prentiss was already exhausted from a day of talking to grieving families who’d been flushed out by the press conference, most of them totally misguided, and the machinations of an unsub who was toying with them, calling in his own doubles dumpsite and letting the payments for the storage unit that got them here lapse on purpose so they would piece together their investigation the way he wanted. Rossi, back from where Morris had been grabbed on her way to meet a friend she thought had a lead, was agitated; Gideon was pensive, having gotten nothing out of the internet café owner; Morgan was peering at a Garcia-generated list, trying to find some way to narrow down the dozens of electricians that lived inside the triangle Reid had drawn. In the midst of all this, Reid appeared from wherever he’d been hiding away from the public--which, as much as Prentiss suspected she might come to like Reid, seemed like a really good idea--like a sweater vest-clad angel with a stack of files as thick as his head.

“The phone call gave me an idea,” he announced. “Can someone call your technical analyst?”

“What phone call?” Prentiss asked.

“The call the, uh, unsub made,” Reid said, turning over the unfamiliar word in his mouth like an exotic candy he was unsure of, “alerting us where to find the bodies. I thought--making the contents of the storage locker available to us was highly premeditated, highly sophisticated. But if this were a body, we’d say that this level of organization probably points to prior victims. So what if this isn’t the first time the unsub has tried to insert himself into the investigation?”

Gideon closed his eyes in that way he had of almost seeming to savor a particularly clever thought. “He made practice runs.” 

“If I were the unsub, I’d have tried to make surreptitious contact with the police before,” Reid said. “To savor it, not just that the police have no idea that I’m the killer, but that they have no idea a killer exists at all.”

Dawning realization settled in Prentiss’s bones. “And the local files will have records of witnesses, which no one would think to check across cases,” she finished.

Before she was even done speaking, Morgan had hit speed-dial on the speaker in the middle of the table. Garcia clicked on with her usual panache. “Garcia the great and wonderful, what can I do you for?”

Reid blinked. “Uh, Garcia?” he ventured.

“Yes? Who is this?”

“It’s, uh, Reid? I’m new.”

“Oh! Oh, oh, oh! Wow. It’s lovely to meet you! I mean, not _meet you_ meet you, we really should’ve had a proper introduction back at Quantico--”

“Garcia,” Gideon said, pained.

“Right! Right. What do you need, new guy?”

“Can you check for names that come up multiple times in the police reports for each of the murders that we know of?”

“Uh, sure. I’ve already done that, though, and no dice--”

“This time we’re looking to compare witnesses, not suspects,” Morgan said. 

“Okay, I got you! Hmm--oh, we’ve got a Louis Ivey that pops up a few times…”

“No good,” Rossi said. “It’s an alias, we’ve already looked into it.”

“Okay, okay… Sorry. No other witnesses common to multiple cases.”

Reid looked up. A determined glint was in his eye. “Garcia, can you send us the scanned witness statements?”

“Sure, no problem.” Morgan’s laptop, open on the table, pinged cheerfully. In an instant Reid was pulling the witness statements up, his eyes flickering nearly too fast to follow.

Rossi leaned over Reid’s shoulder, intent. “What are you looking for?”

“Common graphology,” Reid said distractedly. “Broad terminal strokes, close line spacing, angularity particularly prominent on the I and the R--this one.”

Morgan bent over to look. “Pulled over for speeding half a mile from the crime scene. The reporting officer was pulled away when the murder was called in.”

“And because it was a traffic stop, he was forced to provide identification,” Reid said. “Jeremy Andrus.”

Gideon heaved himself up and was out the door in a heartbeat, Rossi, who usually didn’t share his hurried stride, this time right behind him. “Let’s move,” he called out over his shoulder. Prentiss and Morgan scrambled to follow. “Garcia, send us the address.”

“Winging its way over on digital wings now,” Garcia chirped.

Reid stayed behind. Right, Prentiss thought. He was wearing a gun, but probably wasn’t cleared for the field if he hadn’t been explicitly admitted into the unit yet. He was still curled in front of Morgan’s laptop, looking a little lost. She paused at the door.

“Good work,” she told him. The smile he aimed at her was shy, but brilliant.  
  
  
  
ROSSI  


When it was all over, one victim rescued with superficial wounds, the other found alive but too wounded to save, the kids took one SUV back to Quantico while Rossi and Gideon took the other. Rossi had lingered to say good-bye to Jill. A kind of good-bye, anyway. When he finally heaved himself into the driver’s seat, Gideon was tapping his fingers on the dashboard. Thankful for his silent presence, Rossi started the car and began the long drive back to Quantico.

Just past Wilmington, he said, “You should hire that kid.”

Jason still didn’t say anything, only smiled.  
  
  
  
GIDEON  


Reid was milling about outside of Gideon’s office when they got back. Someone clearly hadn’t forgotten that they’d been in the middle of a job interview before the case interceded. The team--the _rest_ of the team--had split, the clock approaching eight at night and their case files wrapped up before they’d left Philadelphia, looking forward to a night off.

Gideon breezed past Reid and settled back into his chair. Ah, to be home.

“Come in, sit down,” he told Reid, who was still hesitating by the doorway. He settled on the chair across from Gideon tentatively, like a bird about to take flight. Gideon smiled at him. “You acquitted yourself well on this case.”

“Thank you, sir,” Reid murmured.

“One of the most important things I look for when recruiting is also one of the hardest to measure. They don’t make tests for it--well, they make tests for everything, but none of them are any good. What I am looking for is the ability to embrace the unknown. Our profiles are a template, not a manual. Often it’s what the unsub does that deviates from the profile that tells us how to catch him.” Reid was listening intently; here he nodded decisively, like a student taking mental notes.

“Reid, you don’t have the experience of the candidates we usually see. The general rule of the BAU is that we take on exceptional investigators with several years’ experience working for a field office or another unit and train them in profiling after they’re accepted. I was thinking of offering you an opportunity to come on as a junior agent on track for promotion to a full profiler after getting some experience.” Reid sat, if possible, a little straighter. His eyes were bright at the possibility. “After Philadelphia, I think that you--and the unit--would be better served if you started as a full profiler immediately.”

“I--I--,” Reid stammered, “really? I--okay. Thank you so much,” he rushed out all in one word, _Thankyousomuch_. “I--I won’t let you down.”

“The PhD in criminal psychology isn’t enough, you’ll have to take a full profiling courseload as well,” Gideon warned. “You’ll also be accompanied by a more senior agent for your first couple of months here, but that’s standard. You’ll be entering on equal footing with the other profilers, not as a trainee.” Reid nodded like a bobblehead. “It won’t be easy, especially given that this is your first real experience as law enforcement. Do you think you can handle it?” 

“I can,” Reid breathed. Repeated, like a mantra, “I _won’t_ let you down.”

Gideon hid a smile behind his folded hands. “Good. Then I’ll see you on Monday.”

On his way out, fairly floating on air, he paused at the door. He was looking at the chessboard. Gideon and Rossi kept an ongoing game where Dave would move a piece whenever he stuck his head into the unit chief’s office. Reid’s long fingers plucked up a black knight, one of Rossi’s pieces, to take a rook.

“Check in four,” he said cheerfully, and rushed off.

Gideon surveyed the chessboard. Clever young man. Not quite clever enough to catch the trap he’d laid, a variation on Boden’s mate, but clever nonetheless. They had time to work on it. But Gideon already knew the kind of BAU agent Spencer Reid would become.  
  
  
  
MORGAN  


So the kid got the job. Morgan was skeptical--did this guy even _have_ instincts?--but open-minded. Besides, he looked fun.

The Monday after Philadelphia the daily briefing was relatively tame: the start of what looked like a disorganized serial rapist in Milwaukee that the police were going to find plenty of forensic evidence on; two stabbings in Georgia which looked like one genuine stabbing and one copycat; one frustrated police department looking to tie together two murders over a period of eight years with ambivalent evidence. In his first round-table briefing, Reid downed two mugs of coffee, volunteered statistics about power-assertive rapists, the demographics of Milwaukee, the copycat effect, the dairy industry in Texas, the manufacture of rubber bands, and DNA evidence degradation, and got Morgan to grudgingly admit that he could get used to traveling with an instant encyclopedia. The girls all thought he was precious, and Morgan could see why, with those doe eyes and endearing eagerness. Gideon doled out consults and whisked off to his classes.

Reid settled at the desk across from Morgan’s. Elle’s old desk. Morgan didn’t flinch.

For Reid’s first consult, Morgan was supposed to look over his shoulder, so they set up in the conference room instead of at their desks. As a profiler, Reid was unexpectedly pleasant to work with: he had a sense of what was typical and what wasn’t that usually only came from experience. Before Reid had gotten in that morning, Prentiss had asked Gideon if he was going to be his training agent.

“He doesn’t need a training agent,” Gideon had said. “He’s coming in as a full-fledged profiler. He’ll shadow one of you for custodials, witness prep, and risk assessments at first, but that’s standard for new transfers who aren’t used to these duties. We’ll put him to work at the training seminars and consults right away.”

“All due respect,” Morgan had butted in while eavesdropping shamelessly, “He’s not a new transfer. He’s an Academy graduate. You sure he’s really up to it?”

Gideon had just looked at him thoughtfully. “I’m sure,” he’d said. Morgan got it more now.

They wrapped up late, as usual. The support agents and techs that made up the majority of the BAU were beginning to close up shop and filter out of the bullpen. As they were packing away the files, Morgan shamelessly began to dig. “So, Reid, got a girlfriend?”

Reid had been taking a gulp of coffee at exactly the wrong moment, but he managed to choke it down. He recovered surprisingly quickly. “Are you asking me out, Morgan?”

“Sorry, kid, you’ve got the wrong bits and bobs,” Morgan said cheerfully. “Just trying to get to know a coworker better.”

“Do I look like a girlfriend sort of person, Morgan?” Reid asked self-deprecatingly.

“Come on, never say never. They say there’s someone out there for everyone.” He grinned. “Me, I’m hoping to meet two or three someones tonight. Prentiss and I are going to check out the new bar that just opened in Logan Circle. You should come with.”

Reid hesitated, but he said, “Sorry, I can’t.”

“What, your mama won’t let you stay out after dark?” Morgan teased.

“Something like that,” Reid said, but he was smiling. He responded well to Morgan’s friendly banter, and Morgan felt himself warm to the idea of Reid as a partner, as a friend.

“Next time,” he said, and meant it.

When Morgan left that night, he looked back over at Reid’s desk. With his books and files heaped on it, it hardly looked like it had once belonged to anyone else at all. He grabbed dances from four beautiful women, in fact, and Prentiss, who was also beautiful but the definition of a bad idea. He slept at Garcia’s that night.

It had been two months since she was shot.  
  
  
  
Reid was--eccentric. No. _Gideon_ was eccentric, with his chess and his birds and his Charlie Chaplin reels. Reid was something else entirely.

There was the fidgeting, for one thing. His gestures when he spoke, but also when he was thinking, eating, or sitting at his desk. Morgan set up a little paper-clip football goal between their desks and they played rubber-band-penalty-kick during the long, dull hours waiting for a coroner’s report to come through or a local cop to call back. There was the slightly unsettling sight of him reading, gargoyle-hunched over a case file or a book, rapidly flicking pages, mouthing along--to what, Morgan didn’t know, because there was no way that even Reid’s rapid-fire mouth could keep up with 20,000 words a minute. There was the genius--but that was the easiest thing to fathom about Reid. He did magic, that hallowed pastime of geeky loners everywhere, and once accidentally “physics magic”ed his film canister into Morgan’s coffee cup. He preferred not to use his computer whenever he could get away with it, which ought to have gotten on Garcia’s nerves but didn’t--for some reason she’d taken a shine to him, maybe because he reminded her of the other nerdy boys at Caltech--and he definitely got on their office manager’s nerves given the amount of paper he went through. He was apparently a card sharp, and Morgan now owed him forty dollars. He was from Las Vegas, and also counted cards, which Morgan only found out about after that little fiasco.

But there were ways in which Dr. Spencer Reid was an oddball, and there were things that were just odd. For someone with such a scant understanding of social cues, he moved with a quiet confidence that you just didn’t see in people like Reid--not that anyone was really _like_ Reid--the kind born of social support and long-term validation.

Morgan contemplated. Profiled. Made Reid listen to Nas, the heathen. The job was easier with Reid around, even if he wouldn’t be doing custodials on his own for a while.

There was one thing about Dr. Spencer Reid that made perfect sense: the flash of exhilaration Morgan saw in his eyes when they were sent off, first after a guy who was burning people at the stake in Duluth and then after a serial killer whose cooling-off period had compressed from a year to a month to a week in rural Arkansas. The way he lived for the call, like Morgan did. Like Prentiss did. Like Elle had done, once.  
  
  
  
GARCIA  


Garcia liked: her home just so, her office just so, her team just so, everything neatly ordered in the midst of what appeared to be colorful chaos, a place for every tchotchke and every tchotchke in its place. She liked her body just so, and getting shot, nearly dying, the lancing pains whenever she leaned over much less tried to do yoga, did _not belong_ with the body that had faithfully carried her through life for thirty-one years. There was a hole in her now, and it could heal and it could scar and it could eventually stop hurting, but it would never go away, that place where a .38mm bullet tore through her skin and tissue and muscle and left her bleeding and raw. These days she felt fragile, less shielded, less like the Black Queen and more like whatever had been hiding under her shell for all of these years.

Elle leaving was another kind of hole, sensitive and unfamiliar but not exactly painful, like a lost tooth you kept probing with your tongue out of wonder that something you took for granted was just not there anymore. Garcia and Elle had joined the BAU within a year of each other; she hardly remembered what it was like without her. At the end, she hadn’t known how to talk to Elle, who had always seemed to be seeing something else when she’d looked at her. It was for the best, she knew, Elle quitting before she broke down or did--something else, something she couldn’t come back from. But it was one more wrong thing in all the wrong things that had bombarded her life of late. The Garcia of five years ago, or even one, would’ve been able to crack wise and carry on. The new Garcia just felt lost.

All that said, Garcia had been prepared to dislike Reid, but Reid was surprisingly hard to dislike. Morgan laughed when she told him this, but Reid was just so _real_ , like he’d never learned any of the artifice of _dealing with people_ , his gigantic brain had been too busy sponging up esoteric mathematical proofs and every detail of particular case studies. Garcia was a girl who used to be all artifice and was slowly learning to be no artifice, and Reid was a bright, shining, awkward ideal in that sense.

They were consulting on a couple of cases, and Reid had dropped by to hand her a list of potential suspects to do medium-deep dives on. She didn’t notice him come in. She was staring in consternation at an email from Cute Kevin, the latest update in a long chain that had started with a friendly debate over the merits of COBOL versus C in structuring large data sets and ended up being about whether the “I’m a PC” guy could take Steve Jobs in a fight.

 _wanna see you again,_ it ended. No question mark, so maybe it was a presumption. Or maybe it was just an idle thought and she’d look overeager if she made a move towards more concrete plans. And then there was the trauma, the screaming, how could she invite someone over when Morgan was camped out on her couch and she woke up in the middle of every night sweating up an unattractive storm… She tapped her pen against her lip in an effort not to bite her nails, an old habit she’d stopped once she’d started getting more colorful manicures but which she’d been longing to return to since her… injury.

“The Columbia Room downtown is pretty good,” Reid said in her ear. She screamed.

Reid jumped back like a startled deer, which was totally unfair considering that he was the one who’d snuck up on her. She pointed an accusing, aquamarine-tipped finger at him. “You need to learn how to knock, bucko!”

“I did! You were… distracted.”

Oh. Garcia hurriedly flipped to another screen and tried to look supremely busy cross-referencing. Reid navigated the edges of the room to lightly place a thin sheaf of papers by her elbow, all covered in his illegible scrawl.

“By Wednesday?” he asked meekly. She’d already forgiven him. The sweet, annoying thing about Reid was that when he did something creepy like lean over so closely his breath scraped your neck to read your email over your shoulder, he did it in complete innocence of its creepiness.

“You shall have it forthwith.”

“Thanks, Garcia.” He turned to leave.

“Hey, what was that you were saying earlier?”

“Earlier when?”

“Earlier just now. When you nearly gave me a very unfunny aneurysm.”

Reid smirked--a Buffy boy, promising--and said, “Oh, I was just saying… The Columbia Room in the city is a nice place to take a date. If you had someone in mind.”

Profilers! They were all eavesdropping, private email-reading sneaks. She opened her mouth to give him a piece of her mind, but his earnestness was surprisingly disarming, and what came out was, “Thanks, Dr. Yenta, but I’m not sure I’m ready for anything serious right now.”

Reid hesitated. “I’m not sure anyone is,” he said slowly. “It’s none of my business. Sorry.”

“It’s all right, kiddo. I’m in an advice-taking mood anyway.”

Reid smiled hesitantly at her. “I’ve noticed the others… sometimes they’re careful around you. Like you might break. It’s up to you what you want to tell me,” he added hurriedly when Garcia began to droop. “But if this has anything to do with that… You might be surprised how well something new can heal you. Take it from me,” he said self-consciously. Then he smiled. “Their cocktails are really colorful. It seems like your kind of place, that’s all.”

He’d hurried off down the hallway before she could stop him, or thank him. Garcia tapped her pen thoughtfully. Socially maladjusted genius Dr. Reid believed in the power of love. It was strangely warming.

Garcia had always believed in the power of love--to mend griefs, to strengthen weaknesses--until recent events shook her faith. While Morgan slipped towards God, Garcia had drifted away. It was strange to see that old belief reflected back at her from the open, boyish face of the last person she’d expected to believe in something as illogical and messy as new, healing love. It rekindled something burnt-out and tired in her. Some kind of faith.

Not today, but soon, she would send Morgan away, she’d compose a reply with just the right level of interest and casualness, she’d learn how to be alone in her space again before she invited Kevin over for the first time. She’d kiss Kevin Lynch and revel in the feeling of being adored, of adoring, of being with someone who understood her down to her toes. It wouldn’t all be because of Reid and this conversation. But she would take him to the sweetly small, lounge-y bar Reid recommended for their first date.  
  
  
  
MORGAN  


Two months in was Chula Vista.

They were called in when a teenage girl, mutilated so badly as to prevent immediate identification, was dumped after having been abducted with her friend nearly a day ago. It wasn’t Reid’s first case, but it was his first time working closely with grieving, desperate parents. And then there was what they’d had to do to get the ID on the body.

Gideon had looked old when he’d said, “The parents. We can use the parents.

“We play the message in front of them, watch for reactions. One of these families will deny what they hear. We’re looking for the other girl.”

Morgan saw the terrible logic of it. It didn’t mean he had to like it.

Reid, too, had looked down when Bruce Owen couldn’t bear to face the truth of what had happened to his daughter. For once, he hadn’t been impressed by Gideon’s prescience, like watching a good magic trick. Morgan sympathized.

At the Vaughn house, Reid was clever, but hesitant to out-and-out accuse. Luckily, they had Rossi for that; sometimes what you needed was just to say something so offensive it jarred something loose. Rossi was good at that. He did indeed knock something loose, just not exactly the thing they were expecting.

They drew on Pat Mannan, who may, in fact, have had permission to carry a concealed weapon in California but would still be a _total idiot_ not to disclose it to the FBI agents in the room. He held up his hands placatingly, but before he could pull out a badge, Reid was talking:

“The rented furniture, the intrusive ‘family friend,’ Lindsey’s precocious maturity, her wholesale lifting of a fictional biography, it all makes sense,” Reid listed off. “You’re in witness protection.”

Mannan reached into his pocket and pulled out what was indeed a US Marshals badge. Which, shit. This case had just gotten a hell of a lot more complicated.

At the station, Gideon and Reid, building on whatever rapport they’d established when Reid outed them unceremoniously, interrogated Jack. Not his first interview, but close. They were treating him like a standard recalcitrant parent: refocus on the child, minimize their ego, remind them of their priorities. Rossi and Morgan were sent to give Mannan the hard sell, as he was much less likely to cooperate. They spent ten unfruitful minutes arguing with him over jurisdictional issues and priorities before Morgan threw his hands up and left to watch the other interview.

“Making any headway?” he asked Prentiss from her perch behind the mirrored glass.

She shrugged. Inside the interrogation room, Gideon was saying, “I couldn’t care less what you did in your past. I just want to find your daughter.”

“Mr. Vaughn, the reason why we looked through your house is because knowing about Lindsey could tell us how she was targeted. If she goes to the movies routinely, we might be looking for someone who stalked her. If she was cautious, that tells us she must’ve known her abductor. By that same token, we need to know what you did,” Reid said. “We need to know who we should be looking for.”

Vaughn stayed stubbornly silent. “Every second counts, Mr. Vaughn,” Reid reminded him.

Gideon’s bright eyes assessed him. “You’re frightened,” he announced out of nowhere in that Gideonish way of his. “Not just of what might be happening to your daughter right now, that’s understandable, we see that all the time. You’re scared that if you talk, your protection will be withdrawn. Then the people from your past really will be coming after Lindsey.” He leaned forward. “I can tell you that ten years in protective custody isn’t a favor. They need you, Jack. They’ll keep you and Lindsey safe. No matter what you tell us.”

“But right now, Lindsey needs you more,” Reid added.

“Do you have kids?” Vaughn asked Reid abruptly.

“Yes, I do,” Reid said.

“What,” Morgan said on the other side of the glass. Beside him, he could hear Prentiss’s jaw slowly hinge back up from where it had landed on the floor.

Automatically he looked for tells, throbbing carotids, flickering eyes, but Reid stared down Jack Vaughn steadily. The trained hit man seemed to buy it, too; he grunted consideringly. And then he started to talk: a gruesome litany of all the people he’d ever killed for the McCrellan mob, testimony come early, and Gideon and Reid listened.

They didn’t have time to discuss that particular twist. Child abductions were always hectic. No one slept, no one took a break for anything longer than the bathroom and the coffee maker. When they worked abductions, as often as not they never made it to the hotel at all. Morgan spent the rest of the night going over Gideon’s notes, meticulously combing through each hit with Garcia for a clue, a hint, anything. There was no time for earth-shattering personal revelations. Even if they involved the words _Reid_ and _baby daddy_.

At first light they regrouped, mired in that familiar limbo of exhaustion, caffeine buzz, and stalled-out leads. “Could be a disgruntled family member of one of his victims,” JJ suggested.

Morgan scowled. “But then how would they have gotten Lindsey and Jack's information? Organized crime I could buy, they've gotten to witnesses before, but a lone vigilante?”

Gideon rubbed at his temples. “Interview the Marshal. Only he would've known the Vaughns' exact location, find out if he let it slip to anyone--an online girlfriend, a fellow Marshal, anyone. And have Garcia do a deep background check on him.”

“Given the type of people Jack says are after him, we have to face the possibility that Lindsey might already be dead,” Morgan said.

“But then why kill Katie?” Prentiss asked.

“Psychological torture for Jack? You had to have seen him trying to find an angle at the crime scene. It might’ve been a sadistic preview. This is what I’m going to do to your daughter.”

Prentiss pursed her lips and didn’t say anything else. Gideon held his hands up placatingly. “Look, look, we’ve been over this a million times with no conclusions. Let's reframe the question. Don’t ask why kill one of the girls, it's impossible to know without knowing what type of offender we're looking for. _Why_ keep Lindsey alive?”

They straightened; for the BAU, a new puzzle to solve worked like an electric jolt, like reanimation. “Control,” Reid said.

“But why keep _Lindsey_ as a hostage?” Rossi asked. “Why not Katie? Keeping one girl gives them power over the authorities, but it also raises the possibility of escape or negotiated release.”

“If the Vaughns were the target, it would've been Lindsey's body we found and Katie they kept alive,” Prentiss realized.

“We profiled that her face and hands were destroyed to prevent identification because she was connected to the killer. If this were someone from Jack and Lindsey's past, he wouldn't have to worry about being identified through Katie--there's no connection there,” Reid added. 

“So Lindsey and Jack being in witness protection is just… coincidence?” Morgan asked. They paused. 

“You know,” Rossi said, “I’ve always maintained that there’s no such thing. This might just be enough to change my mind.”

“So we’re looking for either a preferential offender or a pack of disorganized teenagers after all,” Prentiss reminded them.

“Back to our first theories. Until we have evidence one way or the other,” Gideon said, “Lindsey is just another missing girl.”  
  
  
  
They got their evidence in the form of a body. Not Lindsey’s.

The whole team was there to search the abandoned apartment complex the neighborhood canvas turned up. Reid’s eyes went tight around the corners when they saw the boy, sprawled, staring. Sixteen, eighteen at the most. Defensive wounds all over his arms and face. “The pack follower,” Rossi pronounced grimly, but like that, blue eyes clouded over, he just looked like a child, not someone who had been complicit in the brutal torture, rape, and murder of a girl his age. Like a victim.

Reid snapped out of it in time to pull a name out of Garcia’s databases, and the team split up to interview his friends and family on-site while Reid stayed behind and continued slogging away at the geographical profile. Morgan would regret that decision, later.

The news that Jack Vaughn had slipped his protective detail and probably had intel that they didn’t wasn’t quite the worst thing that could’ve happened that day, but it was close. They gathered back together in an industrial parking lot just north of downtown. They had a name--Ryan Phillips. If they’d had time, they would’ve headed back to the station, shaken some sense into Bruce Owen. They didn’t have time.

“I think,” Reid’s voice came out tinny and crackling through Rossi’s speakerphone, “he’s taken her to the Mayford High School two blocks from here.”

Two blocks from the station, that was two miles from the team’s current location. Morgan was already moving for the SUV when Gideon said, “Reid. Take some uniforms and go after Lindsey. We’ve got to get there before Jack. And stay on the horn.”

Morgan worried. Reid had barely been in the FBI for two months. He’d interrogated one offender--the Duluth witch-hunter--and that was with Rossi looking over his shoulder. When Gideon climbed into the passenger seat of the SUV Morgan was driving, he said, “Gideon. You think he’s ready for it?”

Gideon said, “I think we won't make it in time to save that boy's life. But he might.”  
  
  
  
To the kid’s credit, he did everything right. Stayed calm, appealed to the only thing that might’ve been stronger than Jack’s bloodlust, his parental instincts--which he himself might have had firsthand experience with, Jesus Christ--gave every impression that he’d shoot Jack if he went through with what sounded like, through Reid’s earwig, cold-blooded murder. When the shot sounded, Morgan jerked the wheel and hit the gas. To hell with curbs. One of their own was in danger.

“Reid,” Rossi said anxiously. “Reid, report. Reid! What happened?”

Silence. Morgan swore and hit the ground running, gun drawn, the team right behind. They came across Jack and Lindsey in the hallway; JJ and Prentiss escorted them out. Reid was standing in the bathroom, fine. Morgan at last felt his pulse start to slow, that _not again not again_ rhythm that caught in his chest whenever a team member was in danger ever since Boston. He hadn’t even realized Reid had become a part of that knee-jerk instinct to protect team, family.

Gideon put a hand on Reid’s shoulder. It didn’t even register.

Reid wasn’t fine.

“He killed him,” he said faintly.

Morgan drew back, at a loss. He knew what Reid was feeling and there was no platitude, no easy balm. “There’s nothing you could’ve done, Reid,” Rossi tried to convince him anyway. “We heard you. You couldn’t have saved him. We all know you tried.”

“I should’ve shot him,” Reid said dully. “Couldn’t get a clear shot. Lindsey was blocking my line of sight.”

Morgan shook his head, closed his eyes. God, he’d forgotten how new Reid was. This was probably the first time he’d ever been expected to shoot and possibly kill someone. Probably the first time he’d ever seen someone killed in front of him, someone he was supposed to save.

“I know,” Gideon said, “you did everything you could.”

Reid shook his head, wordless. For once, Morgan couldn’t enjoy it. On the plane, Reid curled up on the couch and fell straight into an exhausted, depressed sleep. No one was quite in the mood for gossiping about Reid’s mystery child.  
  
  
  
JJ  


Reid was better the next day, at least superficially. He looked like he’d slept and had maybe stated the process of forgiving himself. That was why JJ didn’t feel guilty about insinuating herself into Morgan and Prentiss’s avid gossiping that afternoon while Reid was debriefing with Gideon.

“It wasn’t just me, right? I didn’t just hallucinate Reid telling us he has a kid, did I?” Morgan was saying.

JJ huffed out a laugh. “If you did, I heard it, too.”

“Folie à deux,” Prentiss murmured. “Mass psychosis. He doesn’t seem the type, does he?”

“The young father type? Hell, no. How _old_ is he, do you think?”

“Twelve?” Prentiss suggested.

“Twenty-six,” Rossi said behind them, amused. Morgan spun in his chair to pin Rossi with a profiler’s stare.

“ _Tell_ me you knew,” Prentiss said.

“Of course I knew. It’s in his file. Also, I’m an inveterate snoop. It’s shameful it took you schmucks over two months to figure it out, though.”

“Is he married?” Prentiss asked, the insatiable gossip hound in her awakened. JJ almost wanted to laugh at the thought--Reid, married?--but apparently Reid had a kid, so the world was already not what it seemed.

“No,” Rossi said, “and if you want more details, you should ask Reid.”

The day after that, when Reid looked brighter-eyed and bushier-tailed, they cornered him at the elevator bank as he was getting into the office. He stared at them wide-eyed like he had no idea what this was about.

“Well?” Prentiss demanded.

“Well, what?” Reid said, bewildered.

“Well what, he asks,” Morgan said incredulously.

“Is there anything you want to tell us, Reid?” Prentiss prodded.

“No! I mean, I didn’t take the last single-serve cereal from the fridge, it was Garcia!” (”I _knew it_ ,” JJ hissed) “I mean--” 

Spence,” JJ finally took pity on him and put him out of his misery, “how come you never told us you have a kid?”

He flushed. “Is… that what this is all about?”

“We’ve worked together for months, man!” Morgan said. “You don’t have any photos, you don’t tell diaper stories…When exactly were you planning on telling us, at your ten-year anniversary? Their graduation?”

In spite of himself, Reid smiled. “It’s not like that. I'm… protective of him. And I guess I thought, subconsciously, that by not talking about him, I'd be keeping him safe… from all the darkness we see here. Like putting his picture up would be exposing him to our world." JJ could feel herself soften like melting ice cream. She knew what it was to keep secrets for all the right reasons, and some of the wrong ones. Reid looked up apologetically. “I didn't mean to lie to you guys. You just never asked.”

“Yeah, well, that shows us for making assumptions to begin with,” Prentiss laughed.

“We’re asking now,” JJ added. She linked her arm with his. “Tell us all about him.”

Reid only hesitated a little, the irrational instinct to shield his son with his silence lingering, before he said, “His name is Jack.”

“How old is he?” Morgan asked at the same time Prentiss burst in, “Do you have any pictures?”

“Two years, five months, and five days,” Reid answered instantly. “And I do--you guys really want to know?”

“Hey, Reid,” Morgan said, in that surprisingly gentle way he had. “Just because none of us have lives doesn’t mean we don’t want to hear about yours.”

“Is that an admission that your stories about your hordes of women are mostly made up?” Prentiss teased.

“Okay, first of all, I never said _hordes_. Second of all, you need to watch your mouth, a lesser man than I could mistake that for jealousy.”

“You wish,” Prentiss laughed. JJ looked over. Reid was smiling.

At his desk, he pulled out his wallet, which, it turned out, was stuffed full to bursting of photos of an adorable blond toddler who could usually be found staring at the camera with an existentially quizzical expression. The proud grin Reid wore as he showed them off was a foreign expression on his face; it transformed him, made him look worldlier, more mature. JJ had no trouble believing that he was a father now. Husband, yes, okay, she still had her doubts.

“He’s beautiful,” she said, smiling at a picture of the boy-- _Jack_ \--with what looked like tomato puree splashed on his face war paint-style.

Reid blushed and ducked his head. “Thank you,” he said, smiling that wonderful, irrepressible smile. “He just got into spaceships. Well, he’s into throwing spaceship toys and making zooming noises. He just entered what Jean Piaget would call the pre-operational stage and what Erikson characterizes as the autonomy versus shame/doubt crisis, so symbolic understanding and free play are fairly new to him--”

“We all sat through the development psychology lectures in college, too,” Morgan said, amused.

“So you were… twenty-four when you had him?” Prentiss asked. He nodded. JJ and Prentiss exchanged looks over his head--twenty-four wasn’t unheard of, but it was still unusual for a young professional living in a metropolitan area like DC not to wait until their late twenties at least.

“And his mother?” JJ asked gently.

Reid looked down. “She died,” he said bluntly. Prentiss visibly struggled for words. JJ put a hand on Reid’s shoulder.

“Reid, I’m so sorry,” Morgan said.

Reid smiled at them a little self-consciously. “Don’t be,” he said. “I didn’t even really know her. The most we ever had in common was Jack.” JJ pictured it: a college fling gone wrong (part of her still couldn’t get over the idea of a college fling and Reid in the same sentence), maybe with another student, Reid awkward but determined to step up to the plate, and then an accident. Reid alone, lonely, but still determined to do the right thing. Her heart ached for him.

“How do you do it? How do you--you know, with the job?” Prentiss asked with deep sympathy. JJ found herself wondering the same--Reid had been on three cases with overnight travel with them already, which was tough enough on her secret long-distance relationship. As a single father? She couldn’t imagine.

“His aunt’s been taking him when I have to travel,” Reid explained. Beside her, JJ could feel Morgan relax at this proof that Reid wasn’t doing it all totally alone. Fatherhood looked good on him, but he was still twenty-six. A child himself compared to the rest of them. “And we both work, so we have a nanny for the normal nine-to-five workday. Surprisingly, it’s been easier to make it work than I thought it would be.”

“Good,” JJ said, heartfelt. Prentiss and Morgan nodded beside her. “He looks like a sweetheart.”

Reid smiled again, that wide, proud, just-for-Jack grin that they’d never seen before this morning but looked so natural on his face, and offered up another photo from the stack which expanded, accordion-like, from within his wallet. They talked baby things until it was time for the morning briefing. Before she had to go prepare, JJ said to Reid in a low voice, “I think you should bring in a photo. Something to keep _you_ safe from the dark.”

That evening, JJ reported it all to Garcia, who complained vociferously when her office’s distance kept her from the latest gossip. “Oh, that’s so tragic,” Garcia sighed when the story was done.

“I know. I can’t imagine, learning you’re going to be a parent and then finding out you’re going to have to do it all alone…”

“Well, he’s not alone,” Garcia said. “He’s got us, right?”

It sometimes felt as though the bullet had sensitized Garcia, that things which would once have glanced over her now struck deep and painful, that she got anxious more easily, more eager to remind her teammates of how much she loved them in case they vanished into the ether. JJ looked at Garcia, who had only known the young man sitting in the bullpen for two months and had already integrated his son into her definition of family, and smiled faintly. “Yes, he does.”

The next morning, there were two photos on Reid’s desk, one tucked next to the monitor he hardly ever turned on and the other balanced precariously on one of his massive stacks of files. The first was a picture of Reid with a younger Jack, maybe just a year old, on his lap at a park somewhere. The second was a candid, Jack clapping as someone else blew bubbles off-frame, his hands a blur where the shutter speed had lagged behind the moment.  
  
  
  
Reid, it turned out, was--in spite of that lovely morning when he’d lit up as his coworkers cooed over his boy, with Rossi eventually coming down to join the fun and give sardonic, grandfatherly advice--not all right, but JJ had her own problems to worry about. There was Prentiss, who’d confessed to her that she was kind of creeped out by the thought of being in the same room with Chester Hardwick even with Rossi by her side and who came into JJ’s office shaking after the prison security system failed to prevent an _attempted murder_ during a routine interview. There was Will, who wanted to talk about things like _commitment_ and _where they’re headed_ and _telling people_ and other words to run from, who was becoming an increasingly important--and therefore dangerous, in how much he could hurt her--figure in her life.

There was the job. In April, JJ and Rossi joined forces to bully Gideon into accepting an equivocal death investigation. Five suicides in three months, each the parent of a child lost in the infamous Shadyside fire. Suicide always unearthed something still raw and aching in her, but at least grieving parents were a much-needed long way from Rosalyn’s ghost. Still, there was Ronnie Baleman, the detective whose brother might’ve been the fifth victim. JJ envied him almost, the way he’d turned his grief into something constructive, the target he’d found for his pain and rage and helplessness. She couldn’t help but think that murder was in some ways easier. Evil, pure evil, was more digestible than the wasting specter of depression.

“At least when this is over, he’ll have closure,” she told Reid when Baleman stormed off after a particularly difficult death. A mother, hanging in the next room over from her wailing son.

“I don’t think so,” Reid said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“I read his brother’s journal. The phraseology, the handwriting, it’s all consistent with… I don’t know if you can get closure if you don’t have anyone to blame, that’s all. Because then you just end up blaming yourself.”

Suicide after all. It all came reeling back for JJ--the hollow disbelief, the sucking vacuum floating next to her for months, years, afterward where Ros should’ve been standing, the crushing pain that would suddenly come over her and leave her crumpled sobbing on her bed and waiting for Ros to come in and give her a hug and tell her to stop being such a baby.

In the next moment, she shut out and pushed down thoughts of Ros into the tiny box in her mind she’d gotten so good at boarding up. It was getting easier. She wasn’t sure whether she liked that.

It was easier, too, when the case picked up. The motive, once Morgan finally admitted that these were murders, was easy enough to suss out--mercy killings to put people drowning in grief out of their misery. It was figuring out how he was choosing the next bereaved parent to kill that was the problem.

So Gideon sent them to stake out the potential victims they’d identified as most likely to make an Angel of Death perk up and salivate. Rossi and Morgan went after a woman who lost twins in the fire; Reid and Gideon a man who could no longer call himself a single father.

As for JJ, Prentiss was with her, sitting at the wheel of the SUV as they watched Laurie Ann Morris make her way into a boxy detached church. Prentiss had recovered admirably from the shock of nearly becoming one of Chester Hardwick’s victims last week--JJ had always been impressed by her resilience--but this case had shaken her. JJ could recognize the signs.

Prentiss tapped her fingers on the steering wheel impatiently as they sat in silence. “You all right?” JJ asked eventually.

Prentiss startled. “Yeah. You?”

“I’m--I’m fine.” She should’ve known better than to lie to a profiler, but Prentiss, bless her, didn’t press it, maybe had her own baggage with this kind of thing that she wanted to keep stowed away.

They sat in silence, two unsettled woman waiting for death to show up in one form or another.

“It was the baby,” Prentiss said abruptly. “Beth Smoler’s baby. He was still crying when we got there.”

The mother who had “hanged herself.” JJ remembered him--wide-eyed, wet-mouthed, he’d stared at her as she shook his soft plush toy at him and she’d felt the distant ache of remembered loss. He probably wouldn’t have any memories of his mother. “Yeah,” she said.

“And I just thought--you know, I almost--" Carrie, JJ remembered. Last year, Prentiss had almost adopted the sole survivor of a family annihilation. 

“Yeah,” JJ said. “Kids on the mind?” she asked with more humor, but Emily didn’t meet her eye, looked out at the entrance Laurie Ann Morris had disappeared into ten minutes ago with absent shadows lingering on her face.

“Something like that.” She paused. “They just… have no one, you know? Beth Smoler’s son, he has his dad, but… he looked so alone. He’ll never have a mom growing up. We walk through a world of kids with holes ripped in their lives. And we catch the bad guys, most of the time. But the holes are still there.”

Kids with holes ripped in their lives. The hole in her own soul, the Ros hole, pulsed with sympathy. “They find a way,” JJ said. Believed it. Had to believe it.

“Reid’s son,” Prentiss remembered. “He’ll grow up with a hole in his life, too.”

“And Ronnie Baleman. He’ll never stop wishing his brother were here. It happens to everyone. Not just kids. Not just murder victims. We find a way.”

“Unless we don’t.” They were working on a case about suicides, after all.

“Unless we don’t,” JJ agreed. A different subject. She lightened her voice, turned it conspiratorial, warm. “I meant it, you know. I think it’s a good idea. You, kids. Someday.”

“I don’t think so,” Emily said, still distant and sad.

“You don’t want kids?” JJ asked, surprised.

“It’s not really a matter of what I want,” Prentiss said. “I just don’t think I can be--what I ought to be. I thought maybe with Carrie--because she had no one, you know? I could be better than being alone. But choosing to actually have a kid? I think being alone suits me better.”

“Emily,” JJ said, stunned. You’d be a great mother. You have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re one of the best people I know. All of it true, all of it useless.

Prentiss rested her head on JJ’s shoulder. JJ remembered having a sister.

They watched as people began to file out of the church. JJ thought about telling Prentiss about Will. I think sometimes I’ve gotten so used to other people’s grief I don’t know how to be happy myself, she wanted to say. Instead she asked, “What do you think they’re doing?”

“Can’t see her going to a yoga class,” Prentiss deadpanned. “Maybe grief counseling? Or a… support group.”

JJ could feel the epiphany run through Prentiss’s body, like a static current sparking up her spine. Prentiss straightened, eyes suddenly intent. “What’s the one thing both people trying to move on and those stuck in an endless cycle of grief might do?”

“Go to a support group,” JJ realized.

“And a support group would give him the opportunity to relive the precipitating event over and over again,” Prentiss said. JJ was already dialing Gideon as they scrambled out of the car. No vests, no time, the unsub was _here_ , they had to find Laurie Ann before he had the opportunity to follow her home and engineer another tragedy-- “Laurie Ann!” Prentiss called out, gestured for JJ to go around, sweep the parking lot from the other side.

“Laurie Ann!” JJ joined in. They moved through the crowd, calling, frantically scanning faces. Other people were staring, one woman, the facilitator, was coming towards them, “Laurie Ann!” On a whim, JJ cast her eyes over to where Laurie Ann had parked--wouldn’t they have seen her--and stopped. She was there. There was someone else in the back seat.

“Emily!” she cried out, but just as Prentiss looked over, the car accelerated, fatally fast, driving straight into the shed--

Laurie Ann Morris survived with a mild case of whiplash and a few scrapes from the broken glass. Prentiss hauled the man in the car with her, one Peter Redding, from the car into custody, JJ’s gun trained on him all the while.

Later, she saw Prentiss speaking to Laurie Ann over by the ambulance. She didn’t ask her what they talked about. On the plane, she sat and watched Reid page through photocopies of the journal of a suicidal man over and over again, and said nothing then as well.  
  
  
  
MORGAN  


Morgan knew that Reid had taken not being able to save that kid in Chula Vista hard--of course he had, his first death on the job--but Morgan had thought he’d been getting better. He hadn’t snapped, crackled, or had a nervous breakdown, and in fact seemed to wax more alert and resilient each day. He was coping. Morgan was cautiously hopeful that this one might actually make it in the BAU.

In West Bune, Reid lost it.

Morgan agreed that what this town had done to Owen Savage--the bullying, the abuse, the constant failure to meet the needs of a gifted child that had all turned a normal alienated teen into a spree killer who was on the run with his unsuspecting girlfriend--was appalling, but Reid became downright vicious, acidly pointing out the parental and pedagogical failings of everyone around them. Rossi had to pull him aside to tell him sharply that he needed to stop lest he get them disinvited from the case.

“I’m not saying anything that isn’t true,” Reid said mutinously.

“But you are saying things that are _unhelpful,”_ Rossi returned. _“_ Yes, Owen Savage was treated horribly by these people. But don’t you think they’re paying for it enough already?”

“Rossi,” Reid said, “they’ll kill him. They want to kill him.”

“And if you get us thrown off this case you’ll destroy any chance we have of taking him in alive. Go with Morgan. Find us a way.”

In Owen’s bedroom, Reid poked morosely at the boy’s computer. Morgan eyed him from where he was puttering around the bookshelf. He knew he was meant to keep an eye on Reid, maybe impart a little wisdom if he could. It was Reid, though who said, falsely light, “You know, in most of these emails he barely mentions the torment he faced at school. He spends most of his time comforting Jordan. Denouncing _her_ bullies.”

The white knight. “He must’ve felt helpless. Like inside the rules of society there was nothing he could do to protect her.”

“Yeah,” Reid said. “I wonder what that’s like.”

Morgan sighed. So that _was_ what this was about. He sat on the bed heavily. “We both know this isn’t about Owen Savage, Reid.”

“No,” Reid said, “it is. It’s just also about…”

“Ryan Phillips.”

Reid shook his head. He was smiling, but there was an awful bitterness about it. It was the first glimpse Morgan had ever had of the surprising darkness, the sarcastic cynicism, of which straightforward, puppyish Reid was capable. “He was just a kid.” Morgan opened his mouth to--refute? comfort? what could he even say that was true?--but Reid barreled on, “And Owen is just… if his father hadn’t--he could’ve been anyone. And if not for their parents, anyone could’ve been him. You. Me… Jack.” There it is, Morgan thought. There you are. That’s what had shaken Reid, watching a young man die and seeing the child Phillips had only just grown out of being. “Someone--someone else’s baby.”

“Ah, Reid,” Morgan said, “everyone is someone’s baby.” 

Reid didn’t answer, just breathed, unnaturally even, like he could steady his emotions with each deep exhale. “You were right about me, you know,” Morgan said.

“What?” Reid said blankly.

“I could’ve been him. If things were different.” Reid scoffed. “Listen, kid. My first year of high school, I was a runt. Five foot three, maybe 125 pounds on a good day. And those other kids, they made sure I felt it, too.” Reid was quiet now. “I got lucky, I grew out of it. Joined the football team, had a couple growth spurts. But I still remember what it feels like. To be humiliated and helpless.”

“And to want to forget,” Reid whispered. He swallowed, offered up in recompense, “I was eleven. And Harper Hillman comes up to me in the library…”

After that horrifying story--God, a gang of nearly-adults tormenting a child, Morgan’s blood boiled with slow fury at the thought--Morgan leaned forward, put a steadying hand on Reid’s arm. He was looking down at where his hands were in his lap. They weren’t quite shaking, but something close.

“I’m scared, Morgan,” he rasped out.

“Why?”

“I look at him… and I see myself.”

“You empathize with him. That’s what we’re all trying to do here. It’s not a bad thing. It’s part of the job. It’s what we need to do to keep people safe.”

“Does it work?” Reid laughed disbelievingly. “I thought I understood Jack Vaughn. What he felt about his daughter, what he felt about being a father. And now I think maybe I didn’t know him at all. I don’t understand how he could--love and care about Lindsey that much and still do… and still be…”

“A psychopath?” Morgan filled in kindly.

“Yeah. And I guess I’m just scared that it’ll happen again. That for all I understand Owen… it won’t even matter. That I don’t understand him well enough to save him. That maybe I don’t understand people well enough to save anyone. That maybe I’m not cut out for this job,” Reid murmured the last part to himself. Morgan pretended not to hear him. He disagreed, but couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would convince him.

Instead he said, “You’ve already saved lives, Reid. We can’t save everyone. We still have to try.”

Reid turned back to the computer. Morgan wasn’t quite sure whether he’d gotten through to him. He hoped. He hoped.  
  
  
  
Reid didn’t figure out how to save Owen. He did figure out how to save Jordan.

They convinced her to leave with a missive Reid couched in the language Owen used when emailing her to make her feel more comfortable. At the Stratman ranch, the sheriff found a suicide note. “’I’m going to return my mom’s necklace,’” Rossi read out.

Reid was already stripping off his vest. “Hope Savage is buried at the Holy Church of Salvation,” he offered.

 _That little shit,_ Morgan thought when they realized what he’d done.

They pulled ahead of the deputies and officers, Gideon’s thunderous expression and the imminent danger in which the kid had put himself chilling the car into tense silence. Thanks to Morgan’s what might be called in a civilian court reckless driving, they arrived lights on and sirens screaming just as Reid was approaching Owen. No vest, no gun. “Reid!” Morgan shouted, feeling the creeping tendrils of panic crawl up his spine. _Not again not again_ , his heart pounded out against his chest.

“Reid, pull back right now,” Gideon barked out.

He ignored them, _blocked their shot_ with his own body. Spoke to Owen, low and urgent. “I know the harder you tried, the worse it got, and it felt like everybody just stood there watching you suffer, and not a single person even tried to help. I know that your life has been one torment after another and you think that if you can just end it, it’ll all go away,” he said quickly, like if he could just get the profile out in time, if he could just convince Owen that he understood him, it would all turn out all right. “And I know you love Jordan, and you don’t want her to suffer. I know that you don’t want to leave her. You remember what being left felt like, don’t you? How it changed everything. And you don’t want that for Jordan, I know you don’t.”

“Okay,” Owen choked out, grip still tight on his assault rifle. “Bring her out, bring her to me.”

“I can’t do that, Owen,” Reid said, so softly Morgan almost couldn’t hear him from his perch behind the SUV doors. “I’m sorry, I can’t. But if you put the gun down, I’ll take you to her. I swear, I’ll take you to her. Just put the gun down. Just put the gun down.”

And miracle of miracles, he did.  
  
  
  
ROSSI  


Morgan hurried him into cuffs as Rossi took charge, made sure there was absolutely no excuse for “accidental” overreaction from the locals. Reid looked dazed but present, like the relief of Owen’s surrender had lifted the burden of not just the immediate danger and his fear of not being able to save Owen from his shoulders, but something much deeper and heavier as well. He wasn’t smiling. But he was alive. 

Rossi had to admit, it’d been gutsy, what the kid had done. Stupid as hell and it could’ve ended so much worse, but it hadn't, so it was gutsy.

Owen Savage got to say goodbye to his girlfriend. Gideon made sure he was safely transferred into the custody of the Rangers. Rossi kept an eye on Reid, who moved through the motions of post-case clean-up as though he hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary at all.

On the plane, Gideon took the seat across from Reid in the back. Rossi had the row one over to himself, so he took the opportunity to eavesdrop like the pro he was.

Gideon said:

"I could tell you the dozens of ways in which what you did was terrifically stupid, but you knew them all and decided to do it anyway. So instead I want you to think about your son. I want you to think about his aunt having to explain to him that his dad left him an orphan because he decided one murderer 1700 miles away was more important than his own life, than his team's lives, than every person his father could've saved in the future. We have these rules for a reason, and when you break them, you put everyone at risk. The work we do is dangerous, Reid. We don't need any of us willingly making that danger even worse."

“I know,” Reid said softly. “It won’t happen again.”

“You’re right, it won’t.”

“I couldn’t watch as another kid died in front of me,” Reid confessed. “It was… my turn to save one.”

“There are no turns. It’s not a game,” Gideon said gravely. “Every case we have, we devote everything we’ve got, every time. Sometimes we fall short, but we do it knowing there was nothing else we could’ve done. Sometimes the cases stick with you. We don’t let it affect the people we’re helping right now. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Reid said.

“Good,” Gideon said. “And I’m proud of you.”

He stood and dropped into his customary seat across from Rossi for their usual post-case chess game. Recently, Gideon had started playing with Reid, whose appetite for chess was as voracious and intellectually eager as Gideon’s. Rossi was relieved to have someone to split the burden of fulfilling Gideon’s chess habit with. Still, there was something to be said for old habits. Rossi raised a sardonic eyebrow as Gideon set up an early castle. “He could’ve been killed, you know,” he reminded him.

Gideon didn’t take his eyes off the chessboard. “That’s why I reprimanded him.”

“And you would’ve done the same thing, you know.”

“That’s why I said the other thing,” Gideon said, and took Rossi’s bishop with a smile so small as to be invisible to anyone who didn’t know him playing around his lips. “Check.”  
  
  
  
JJ  


They didn’t get much of a break after the tension of West Texas. A few days after that was Miami. Will had shown up.

JJ was not exactly proud of how she’d handled this sudden collision of her personal and professional lives, but self-aware as she was, she also maintained that she’d held herself more or less in check and minimized the messiness given the volume at which her animal brain was screaming for her to run, scratch, claw. She just wished that Will--that he also didn’t want their friends to know, that for Will this was also a time of groping in the dark, taking it slowly, feeling out how serious they were one small, mutually agreed-upon step at a time. Will, though, was not a tentative person. She remembered him calling her two weeks after their case, maybe a little self-conscious but sincere in his thanks, a little brazen in his offer to come visit her sometime. She remembered how flattered she’d been, if a little taken aback. Will’s clarity of purpose, his honesty, was one of the things she admired most about him. She just wished it wouldn’t backfire like this when she wanted to be a blank wall for the team, something impossible to dissect and analyze. 

At least, that was her story and she was sticking with it. JJ was an expert at avoidance. Case in point: The Other Thing she wasn’t thinking about.

With all that she was pointedly _not_ thinking about, you’d think there’d be room in her head for the case, but on the first day they were in Miami she managed to offend Will, sacrifice her professionalism anyway when he still didn’t get the hint, and throw herself off so badly she coasted through the profile briefing. It didn’t help that Emily was there with her too-knowing wink-wink-nudge-nudges, that she wasn’t sure whether to embrace the mild jealousy of Prentiss checking Will out or the horror that she might _know_ or the smugness that yes, she was the one who had landed pretty, pouty Will LaMontagne, for however long their relationship managed to survive after this fiasco. Also, it was sweltering. The heat set her teeth on edge, as if she needed another minor discomfort on top of this case made of minor discomforts.

As she and Reid packed up for a night still spent going over the case, but alone in their respective hotel rooms--or, in her case, wondering whether Will, four doors down, would be bold enough to knock on her door in full view of her coworkers and despising herself for it--he chattered about the statistics of closeted gay men who exhibited homophobic behavior as social camouflage. She was barely listening to the words; instead she was hooked into the tone of his voice. Reid’s statistics were like white noise, soothing after a long day which had almost nothing to do with neat lines of numbers and percentiles at all. She loved him for that.

“How many men and women resign themselves to unhappiness because they can’t admit who they are to themselves?” she mused.

Reid shrugged, but it was more subdued than his usual manic gestures. He looked sad, too. “Hard to say. Studies of subconscious sexuality suggest that as much as 10% of the population might exhibit at least minor attraction to the same sex, but less than half that number self-identify as experiencing same-sex attraction, even in anonymous surveys.”

I can’t even imagine, was what JJ should say now. What a JJ who wasn’t hiding half her life from her coworkers would say. “And the strain of that… it could even drive someone to murder,” she said instead, cringing when she heard too much sympathy in her own voice.

“Maybe,” Reid said. Their other theory was that it was a hate crime. That, at least, they were sadly familiar with. This was stranger, and tougher. JJ shook her head. “Any kind of severe strain can cause a psychotic break in those susceptible to it. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

She didn’t stiffen. “About what?” she said, too-carefully.

“About what we’re capable of. Any of us.”

The last few days Reid had been cheerful, steadier, like saving Owen Savage had helped to steady something long off-balance in him, even though he’d promised Gideon he wouldn’t start keeping score. But there was a similar melancholy on his face now. A kinship of sorts floated between them. JJ remembered the months it took for Reid to confide in them about his son, and wondered what other secrets he, too, was keeping.

“Us more than most,” JJ answered, feeling older than her years. “The BAU doesn’t exactly leave a lot of time for relationships or healthy support systems.”

“At least you have Will,” Reid said lightly.

Her head whipped around. “What? Who told you that? Will and I aren’t--there’s nothing--we aren’t--”

Reid looked fully mortified. “I’m sorry! I just thought. Anyway. Sorry. My mistake.”

She caught him giving her furtive, confused glances as she hurried to leave before him. Reid wouldn’t say anything, she knew by how embarrassed he looked now, but it was still--it was _so_ \--one down. One of her teammates _knew_ , in spite of her denials, because she knew profilers, knew that Reid would trust his own deductions before anything she would say. Maybe all he’d needed to figure it out was fresh eyes. Maybe she was that obvious after all.

Outside, Will stood morosely in front of the station as he comforted Luvet’s fiancée over the phone.

That night, Will didn’t end up coming to her hotel room. She went to his.

“Look,” she said quietly when he cracked the door, before he could even open his mouth to say anything, “can we not talk about it? We’ve spent enough time arguing about it today. Can I just--” she stepped in, embraced him, felt the burden that he’d been carrying all day, the weight of a friend’s death, shift onto her shoulders. Can I just hold you, she didn’t say. Can I just help you with this right now? Asking would lay her too bare. She trailed off and hoped he got it.

Will didn’t understand her need for calculated silence, for time and space to mull things over, pace a question out. Still, he mumbled into her shoulder, “Okay,” because he wanted her to be happy. Of that, at least, she had no doubt. She softly closed the door behind her. Anything too loud might rouse the profilers in their warrens.  
  
  
  
The unsub killed again the next day, but Morgan managed to talk him down from potentially shooting up a hostel. According to _Tina_ , it had been very impressive. They were flying out tomorrow, so Morgan had already sashayed off with her for a night on the town, leaving the rest of them stuck packing up the blizzard of files any case generated. 

Gideon had seen him off with an unsmiling but indulgent eye. Elle used to call him “Dad” behind his back, because for all his strictness and uncompromising focus on the job, he harbored an invisible but truly mushy soft spot for the team off it. You could never have gotten Gideon to crack a smile, but you might have gotten him to joke with you in that stone-faced, unreadable way of his.

Gideon had a son. His picture was in a corner of the cabinets he set the photos of his victims on, nestled between the grown-up would-be victim of a child murderer and a posed family photo including a soccer mom who narrowly escaped death by fire. JJ thought she probably knew him better than Stephen did, who was two years older than her and lived in Providence and had never visited the BAU, not once. There was Rossi, whose record spoke for itself. There was Morgan, with his endless one-night stands and no one who ever stayed. There was Prentiss, who was so lonely and so resigned to being alone. The job ate people alive. She could let it. Let this thing with Will go, never let him even have a chance to be more important than her work.

But there was Garcia, who joyfully shared anecdotes every morning in JJ’s office about whatever weird thing was growing between her and Kevin Lynch. But there was Reid, trying so hard to protect his mystery son from the horrors of their lives, who might even succeed. There was Jack, beautiful, sweet, with a smile that could light up the world on the pictures Spence brought in.

The repression, the loneliness, it ate people alive too. They had ample proof of that sitting in a cell mumbling, “I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything with those guys” under his breath like a mantra, like it mattered more than murder, more than life. “Take care of yourself, JJ,” Will had said, and it had sounded like a goodbye.

“You should go for him.”

“What?” she asked, distracted.

“You’d make a cute couple,” Prentiss said. There was something tired in her voice, like she’d been saying the same thing for hours and JJ just hadn’t been hearing her.

JJ realized with a rush that she didn’t want to lose him. She wasn’t sure if she could keep him, but she did know that she didn’t want to lose him, not like this, not when she might be--no, no, don’t think about it but also don’t let the job swallow you up. Not like Gideon, who didn't even speak to his own child. 

“You know what,” she said, and ran to catch him.

In his arms, she confessed: Will was frightening because the distance between them meant there was no going slow, because a step like moving in together meant someone quitting the job they’d devoted their life to, making a conscious decision that what they had could be even more than the work. And telling people was a step closer to having to choose. And it wasn’t about the people _knowing,_ it was trying, tripping, to describe what they had, putting into words that it was permanent, and the potential pain of finding out it was only temporary after all. “And I’ve always run from getting hurt, always, and--I don’t want to run anymore,” she fumbled, “not from you, and--"

“Just shut up,” he told her, and kissed her, in full view of the precinct and the team and everyone. So that was one way of doing it.

They were doing this. They were a Couple now. She probed herself for panic. Present, but not overwhelming. She could do this. This, at least, she could do.

When they broke for air and she looked back over at her friends, Gideon gave her an approving nod, Reid smiled shyly at her. Prentiss was just watching. She gave JJ and cheerful, and totally unsurprised, thumbs-up.

Well then.

They didn’t go out that night. They spent it in her hotel room sketching out a tentative way forward, small steps that wouldn’t spook the skittish horse that JJ actually was but inexorably moving towards a life together. Still, her secrets chafed at the lockbox in her mind. She pushed it down. Will, the concept of him, of his love for her, that they might have a future together--that was terrifying enough without telling him about it. The Other Thing.

Maybe she’d gotten too good at her job.  
  
  
  
When she got the test results back from her gynecologist a few days later, she regretted that. No plan, no preparation, no idea what she was going to say to Will. The nausea, the swelling, the headaches, the spotting. The baby. The baby. It was too big, too big, too much to get her arms around, to shape into words or even grapple with as a thought. 

She did what the BAU did best: threw herself headfirst into a case, into helping some other woman with some other people’s problems, and hoped her personal life would eventually work itself out.

That turned out to be another mistake. Watching Keri Derzmond’s fiancé recoil from the knowledge that she had an abortion without telling him sent a cold clenched fist of ice through her heart in spite of the warm May air.

She wished Rossi and Gideon were here and not looking into a woman’s abuse defense in Boston. They would know how to fix this, how to catch the stalker without upending Keri’s life. She wished she didn’t empathize so fully with Keri. She wished she didn’t have her own decision to make when this was all done.  
  
  
  
“Wait,” Reid said to Morgan, “you _threw yourself off a building?_ ”

“I _leapt_ to the neighboring rooftop,” Morgan said smugly.

“ _How?_ ”

“Gracefully,” Morgan said.

“Carelessly,” Rossi put in.

“ _Why_ ,” Reid amended.

Morgan’s laughing expression grew serious. “I thought I could keep him from falling,” he said. “For all the good it did.”

“Well, he’s awake now,” Gideon told them before he doled out assignments. Rossi, charismatic and a little famous, was going to testify; Morgan would accompany him and help the DA where he could, as the only one besides Gideon who’d been on the team during the original case and the owner of a barely-used JD. The rest of them were to hunt for physical evidence linking Brian Matloff to the three--or more--girls murdered on cold, brisk mornings in 2004. Reid went over his personal effects with new eyes, JJ and Prentiss tracked down a potential lead, Garcia unsealed some tricky adoption records, and Gideon’s sympathetic gaze and warm presence eked out a confession from Matloff’s biological mother. Still, because nothing ever went smoothly, there was an attempted courthouse shooting and a near-successful escape before it was all over.

That night, JJ drove Reid home. The trains were still running, but they were all emotionally exhausted, and she wanted to get him back to his son sooner rather than later. She didn’t dwell on why.

Reid lived in a large, neatly kept apartment with books crammed into every nook and cranny in Arlington, an enviable stone’s throw away from the District. When JJ pulled into the driveway of his building, there was a blond, curly-haired woman in her thirties standing in the lobby. She was holding a fussy toddler with hair a light shade that might darken to hers once she got older. JJ recognized the child, if not the woman. Reid smiled sleepily at them.

He said, “Come in. Meet my son.”

JJ opened the door, trancelike from exhaustion and some strange filling feeling in her chest, and followed him in, where Reid was already lifting Jack from--his aunt’s? must be--arms. The boy soothed. “Thank you, Jessica,” Reid was saying. “I’m so sorry, the trial was supposed to be over much earlier, but there was an incident at the courthouse…”

“And you had to go be a hero,” the woman--Jessica--said. She had a frank, warm face. “It’s okay. This little man wouldn’t go down, so I decided to wait up for you.”

“I thought you promised you’d be good for Aunt Jessica,” Reid told the boy, his son, Jesus, she'd known but until this moment hadn't really _understood_ , in mock-stern tones. Fatherhood, playfulness, looked good on him. “Didn’t we promise?” He hooked his pinky around Jack’s fist. JJ felt something like a vise settle around her chest, almost sweet in its pain.

“No good nap,” Jack grumbled. “No, no. No good.”

“Well, you’re going to have a no-good nap now, like it or not.” He looked up and pinned her with his gaze. She tried to look like a cool, serious federal agent instead of a cooing moron. “Hey, Jack, this is JJ. She works with me. She made sure I was in time for bedtime. Can we thank her?”

Jack shyly peered at her from around Spencer’s ridiculous hair. “Hi hi thanks,” he said.

“Hi,” she whispered.

“Hi hi,” he said again, and hid his face in Reid’s hair.

Jessica smiled at her. In a daze, JJ turned to make pleasantries on autopilot. “Jessica Brooks,” she said. “It’s good to meet you, I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Really? She looked at Reid, curious, and he blushed, turned his head away in the same way his son did when he was embarrassed. “Reid likes to keep his private life a state secret, so I can’t say I can return the favor,” JJ laughed.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Jessica smiled. “I’m the one who helps Spencer with Jack when the nanny goes home and when he’s traveling. And I’ve heard plenty of stories about you and the rest of the BAU.”

JJ cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, this I’ve gotta hear.”

“First, did you all really catch the Bay Hill Ripper by--”

“Jessica,” Reid said in a rush, “Thankyousomuch for tonight. Really. Thank you. Shouldn’t you get home now? You have work tomorrow, right?”

Jessica laughed, touched Reid lightly on the shoulder. They didn’t hug. Jessica did kiss Jack’s downy head of white-gold hair before she took her leave, though.

“His mother’s sister,” Reid explained upstairs, after she watched him put an already-drowsing Jack to bed like a pro. “On days like this, or when I’m out on a case, she takes Jack. I don’t know what I would do without her.”

Reid offered her a drink from a surprisingly well-stocked, for someone who was normally so austere--and unsurprisingly well-locked--liquor cabinet. “I’m glad,” JJ said, and meant it, feeling something tight and hot in her throat. Damn hormones. “Jack, he’s lovely.”

“He’s most of my world,” Reid said. There was a maturity in his eyes that had once seemed out of place to JJ but which now made all the sense in the universe.

That night, she called Will. She still wasn’t ready. But she’d made her choice anyway.  
  
  
  
MORGAN

As far as Reid mysteries went, there was Reid’s out-of-place confidence, and then there was his hair.

His fashion sense had always been nerdy but strangely appealing: color-coordinated, sport coats which flattered his long frame, vests with sleeves rolled up or under dark blazers and cardigans that made him look professional instead of geeky. His hair was styled, still too long to be strictly regulation but with neat waves that he took care to tuck behind one ear.

In mid-April, he stopped wearing all of that and started coming to work in short-sleeved button-downs and thick-framed glasses. His hair went flat. Overnight, he transformed from bordering on fashionable to a slightly greasy substitute math teacher. 

Morgan, who paid more attention to clothes than he would ever care to admit, was the one who said, “It’s Casual Fridays, not Casual Aprils.”

Reid scowled at him. “My outfit meets the business casual standard recommended in the FBI handbook, _unlike yours._ ”

“It doesn’t meet the standard of not searing my eyes,” Morgan said.

And it went on like that. There would be weeks or months when Reid dressed like a Brooks Brothers model and then months when he didn’t. Other patterns emerged, too. On good-fashion days, Reid smiled more, didn’t worry about leaving in time to pick up Jack from his aunt’s house. Girlfriend, Prentiss deduced, and Morgan had to agree. But even though he was opening up more, had even brought Jack into the BAU for twenty minutes one warm June morning, Reid never said a word about his apparently tumultuous love life, which intrigued Prentiss but drove Morgan crazy.

In August, they found out why.

It’d been a long, lazy summer, a case a month if that, and they were coming back from a leisurely night on the town. That they’d been driving past Reid’s place was sheer coincidence. Morgan was tonight’s designated driver; they’d already dropped off JJ and were heading to Prentiss’s via Reid’s street when they rolled by. He’d begged off that night, pleaded prior plans along with Garcia, but they saw him now. He was standing in front of the building, backlit by the open door.

He was kissing someone. He was kissing a man.

White, taller than Reid, wearing a suit. The shadows of the night obscured his face. Beside him, Prentiss sat bolt upright. Morgan, because he was a decent person, did not slow down to goggle. He just watched as they grew smaller in the rearview mirror, as Reid’s mystery man got into a taxi and Reid waved him off.

“Oh my god,” he said at last, when they’d cleared the street. He pulled over, the very definition of distracted driving at the moment. 

“Right?” Prentiss said.

“He could’ve told us,” Morgan said at last. That was the biggest blow. That Reid was gay was surprising, but not shocking--if he’d been asked to place bets, Morgan would’ve gone either way. And of course he didn’t care. He remembered Miami, the case with the unsub killing men he was attracted to and assuming their identities, Will saying, _I can’t think of anything I’d’ve cared less about_ , and felt the truth of it. Prejudice had no place in the BAU--it clouded the judgment--but even more than that, everyone loved Reid, had adopted him and his son firmly over the past few months as part of the family. This would never have changed that.

“It’s the FBI, Morgan,” Prentiss said. “Would you have?”

She knew the answer. Maybe because they worked and lived in such close proximity to each other, under the exposing gaze of some of the most perceptive people on the planet, profilers hoarded their secrets. Morgan hadn’t told anyone about his own until being accused of murder had forced his hand, after all. This wasn’t the same, though, Morgan thought. This was a major part of Reid’s life, not a years-ago trauma. “He couldn’t have thought we would care,” he insisted. 

Prentiss said nothing. Morgan drove on, turning over in his head what he’d say to Reid tomorrow, wondering when Reid would finally trust him enough to confide in him the way people who were as close as he’d thought he and Reid were becoming did.

The next morning Reid walked in wearing the ugliest of his sweatervests. Morgan found him in the conference room. Prentiss disapproved of his confess-and-confront strategy; she thought they should pretend not to know until he told them in his own time, as with JJ. Morgan had pointed out that in the end even she, ever-patient, had been needling JJ to just spit it out.

Besides, Morgan knew better than Prentiss that if given the choice, Reid would never say it. And he should be able to. Say it.

“Hey, kid,” he said. Reid, more subdued than usual, barely looked up from his coffee and a case report. “How’s things?”

“Busy,” Reid said distractedly. “There’s been an outbreak of mumps at Jack’s daycare. Have you seen this St. Louis consult?”

Two John Does slaughtered and dumped at literal garbage disposal sites. Another and they might even make the trip down there. “Yeah,” Morgan said, “it’s nasty.”

Something about his tone made Reid look up. “What’s up, Morgan?”

Morgan had never been accused of a lack of courage. He summoned it and said, “So Prentiss and I were passing by your place last night.”

Reid didn’t stiffen. “Yeah?”

“And I thought you should know--we saw you getting friendly with your beau.”

Reid pulled back as if burned. His expression shuttered, blankness falling over an almost-terror that Morgan ached to see. “Oh, really,” he said frostily. “You were just _driving by_.”

“Hand on heart, I swear. We were going from JJ’s to Prentiss’s, you know you’re smack in the middle.”

“Fine. Okay. Thanks for telling me.” Reid stood, started to gather his files like he wanted to be anywhere but in this room with Morgan. His hands were shaking, Morgan noticed. “I’ve got--I’ve got a lot of work to do--”

“You could’ve told us, you know,” Morgan said gently.

“I didn’t say anything one way or another,” Reid said coolly, that sharp edge Morgan had seen in West Bune coming out again to cut. “You were the ones making assumptions based on the fact that my son necessarily spent some time in a uterus at some point during his short life.”

His hands were shaking and Morgan could not stand to watch his fear for a moment longer. He reached out and stilled them. “Reid, listen, we don’t care.” Reid still wouldn’t look at him. “I swear to God, it doesn’t make a shred of difference in how we think of you. For me, or for Emily. You’re still the annoying know-it-all who’s saved my ass more than a few times.”

Slowly, Reid thawed. His features relaxed slowly from the tense mask they’d been twisted into. Something inside Morgan uncurled with relief. “I just thought you should know that we know.”

“Thanks,” Reid whispered.

“And I thought--if you wanted to tell the others, you should know you could.”

Reid looked away. He was still so young. He was so brilliant, and now that Morgan had seen him with Jack he could say with certainty such a good father, that it was easy to forget. Maybe this was the first time he’d ever talked about it with a colleague. Maybe the first time he’d ever said anything about it at all. “We’ve got your back, Reid,” Morgan said. “Every one of us. Every one.”

Reid’s hands had stopped shaking.

Morgan nodded, released him, turned to go, message delivered, intel shared. At the door, he heard a, “Thank you, Morgan,” said so quietly he almost didn’t catch it at all.

They did end up going to St. Louis after they got not just their third body but a fourth as well in the space of two days. Over strip-mall Chinese, Reid told a story about an ex-boyfriend, which was actually kind of sad because the guy sounded like a jackass, but got the point across. JJ let her hand rest on his shoulder a little longer than usual when she said goodbye. Rossi hardly looked like he even noticed. Garcia beamed at him when she saw him next. Gideon, the bastard, had probably known it all along.

Morgan just wondered how he’d need to adjust his wingman technique on the rare occasions Reid abandoned his responsibilities to hit the bars with him.  
  
  
  
JJ

Late August. Twenty-six weeks in and JJ’s panic beat under her breast every day like a second heartbeat.

Bad metaphor.

She wasn’t quite showing through her clothes yet--her mother showed late when she was pregnant, she was once told--but her face grew rounder and fuller every week and she needed to tell the team, she needed to schedule her leave, oh God, she needed to tell her mother. But JJ knew herself, saw herself making the same choice she did with Will--if she didn’t talk about it, it wasn’t real and therefore not about to utterly disrupt her life. Garcia was vocal about her dislike of change; JJ wasn’t sure if she hated change, exactly, but she was horrified by things which threatened to upend everything she knew about herself and her place in the world.

It didn’t help with the panic, not telling anyone, watching them go on with the job oblivious--hopefully oblivious, she still remembered the heat that had lingered on her cheeks for hours after Morgan had teasingly revealed that they’d known about Will from the very beginning--to the way JJ had been forever altered, would be forever altered in just fourteen weeks. There was just never a good time, she told herself, although that was hardly going to change between now and the moment when her frame would give her utterly away. Work, at least, continued on in the same everyday fashion. At work, she could pretend for a little longer that nothing had changed, was changing, was about to change at all.

Then there were small moments when the panic ebbed and she felt ecstatic anticipation bubbling under her skin, some long-ago wonder from playing house as a child taken root in stubborn, rocky soil. She floated through a daze of questions about hair color and eye color and personality, if he’d be a biter or a wailer or a sleeper. If he’d look like Mom or Will or Ros. She knew that much, anyway. He. What did she know about raising boys? What about all the boys who had turned out bad, the ones she met and struggled to empathize with in her line of work? The panic always returned in the end.

On one of those nights the team was at Reid’s apartment for a post-case glass of wine. JJ was drinking club soda, but luckily she’d never been much of a drinker anyway. They used to always hold these decompression sessions at Rossi’s mansion, but in the last few months they’d increasingly turned to Reid’s place so that he could tuck in Jack before meeting the grown-ups for languid chat and profiler’s gossiping. Rossi still hosted frequently enough--the man did own a mansion--and now that they knew about Jack, Reid even left his son with Jessica and joined them every now and then. But on nights like these, he didn’t mind their presence in his apartment; he said he thought the rumble of their voices in the living room soothed Jack, let him sleep faster and sounder on nights when the BAU took over his home.

Gideon'd had one drink and taken his leave, Rossi following him soon after. JJ had gotten the feeling that they wanted to leave the younger team members alone to do whatever it was they thought they did when their bosses weren’t around. Now Morgan was lying on his stomach trying to convince Jack to say “Derek.” Jack, meanwhile, looked at him like he was an idiot, pointed to Reid, and corrected him, “Da,” or sometimes “Da da ba.” Garcia cooed, as she did. JJ and Prentiss were lounging on Reid’s couch. The mantel above them was filled with pictures of Jack with Reid or Jessica or, in one case, a pretty blond woman, older than she’d expected, who Reid had stiffly introduced as just “Haley.” Reid watched it all with a tolerantly amused air.

“Come on,” he said eventually, “let’s get him to bed before he starts thinking my name _is_ Derek.” Morgan pouted, but sat up and let Reid lift Jack into his arms. JJ watched, only half-listening to Prentiss and Garcia avidly discussing the torrid affair SA Burke and CSU technician Butler were carrying on, the rest of her focused on Reid and Jack, the easy way his hands rested on his back, the way he made an exaggerated sleepy face that forced a yawn from Jack, who looked surprised at his own tiredness. “Bedtime,” Reid crooned.

“Bed ty.”

“Mm-hmm, that’s right. Want a story?”

“Yeeaah,” Jack said immediately.

“ _Little Pea_ or _The Very Hungry Caterpillar_?”

They slipped into Jack’s bedroom, the sound of his baby-babbling drifting out to them in the living room. Morgan beamed after them. Reid’s parenthood seemed to bring out something bright and adoring in them all. Except for JJ. She’d been aloof lately, not out of a lack of love but because children in general had taken on a strange allure, a sort of mystique, that drew and terrified her in equal measure.

She didn’t realize she was staring after them too until Garcia leaned over her shoulder and said, “I know. It’s weird how good he is.”

“That’s not why I--” JJ laughed, self-conscious.

Prentiss gave her an understanding look. To think, just a few months ago she’d been pitying Emily and her complicated relationship with the idea of motherhood. Small crises after a tough case seemed positively tame in comparison to the huge roiling thing which had settled in JJ’s gut.

Later that night, when Prentiss was browsing a record collection that swung surprisingly from the Philharmonic’s renditions of Mozart and Shostakovich to classic pop rock like the Rolling Stones, and Garcia had nodded off on Morgan’s shoulder, JJ found Spencer leaning against the counter, watching a team which was swiftly becoming his family with a look of deep content and satisfaction. He might have a parental urge to provide and shelter them, for all that he was the youngest. “We’ll mop them up before we go,” she joked.

“I don’t mind. I like the noise. I mean, having a two-year-old creates plenty of noise, but it’s different when it’s--” he flushed shyly-- “friends.”

JJ felt her soft spot for Spencer soften even further. She thought that this was probably as close as she’d ever gotten to mothering in her life. “Don’t you ever get lonely?” she asked abruptly. For all that he had the team and Jessica, it still sometimes bothered her, the idea of Reid all alone with a child and no one always there for him to lean on. Impending parenthood was terrifying enough for her, and she did have someone to share the burden with. Reid still refused to let Morgan set him up with anyone, though if what Prentiss and Morgan had seen last week outside his building was any indication, he might not have needed help on that front. Still. She worried.

“Sometimes,” Reid admitted. “But I’m never really alone. And I never regret it.”

She studied him. “How did you do it?” she asked, not sure if she meant having a baby or joining the BAU or both, because for all his skill now, she was sure he hadn't been prepared for either when the time came. JJ sympathized.

Reid sipped his John Daly and said, “Terrified and in love, every minute.”

It wasn’t the answer she wanted, but she could tell it was the truth. “I’ll drink to that,” she said, and let him think that she was talking about the team.  
  
  
  
New York was--  
  
  
  
ROSSI  


He didn’t even feel the blow, one moment there was a blinding, painless flash of light and the next he was sprawled on the ground, he could feel the scrapes pulling at his skin and an endless ringing like a struck dinner bell in his skull, but it took him precious moments to think _explosion_ and then _IED_ and then, eight unforgivably late seconds after the bombing, _Reid._

Rossi forced himself upright. Their SUV was a gleaming, smoking wreck--it had been a target, someone had targetd them--and Reid was sprawled ten agonizing feet away, his limbs askew like--like nothing, any metaphor Rossi’s writer’s brain could come up with was unacceptable--but he stirred, those long, coltish legs shuffling as he struggled to prop himself up. Rossi didn’t know how he got there, but he was by Reid’s side. The kid’s eyes were unfocused and he had a gash on the side of his head, that amazing, extraordinary head of his, and it made Rossi’s stomach flip-flop. But he was alive.

“The car,” he was saying. “Rossi, the car. The car.”

“The car blew up. Spencer, stop talking.” Rossi scanned the surrounding sidewalks--for help, a clue, anything, his great profiler’s brain overclocked, he didn’t know what he was looking for at all. Sirens. Good. That would help. He looked back down at Reid, who was bleeding sluggishly but not fatally from the head wound. Scraped jaw and palms--probably landed on his hands and face, poor kid--gravel in his hair. Not too much blood anywhere else, but the internal injuries--

“Rossi, the car,” Reid was still saying. “Are they okay?”

“Is who okay, kiddo?”

“JJ ‘n the baby,” he slurred. “She’s pregnant… are they okay…”

“Yes, shhh, JJ’s fine. She wasn’t with us, Spencer, she’s fine.”

A kid in a gray sweatshirt ran up to them. Rossi gave him a cursory once-over: adrenaline pumping, eyes huge, brave to be out here instead of running for cover-- “Oh my god! Are you guys all right?”

Rossi had pulled Reid’s head into his lap. When had that happened? “Get to cover,” he snapped. “Get out of here, kid--not you,” he said to Reid sternly, who’d started to move on autopilot at the sound of “kid,” which he might legitimately have thought was his name after all the ribbing Rossi and Morgan had given him about his age. “Go, get out, call the police--”

“I already did--is he okay? He doesn’t look so good.”

“’M fine,” Reid protested.

“No, he’s not,” Rossi snarled. “Get an ambulance, go--”

“Yeah, they’re coming--”

Like choirs of heavenly angels, an ambulance turned the corner two blocks down. Rossi sighed. “Okay, kiddo, it’s gonna be okay--”

Except they stopped. Police cars, large dark SUVs like the one that had just blown up in their faces. They were setting up a barricade--and it all came back to Rossi in a horrible flash. He and Reid had never made it to the police commissioner, but it didn’t matter--Homeland Security was closer, Morgan would’ve already briefed DHS agents to hold back emergency services--and the alert had gone out citywide from the station the moment they’d realized what was going on--

They weren’t coming.

Reid was sprawled bloody and maybe a little broken in his lap and they weren’t coming.

Rossi closed his eyes in despair.  
  
  
  
GARCIA  


Garcia was on the verge of tears, her own horror and fear--and she’d always been the kind to freeze up and that was _so_ not what she needed now, so not what her team needed from _her_ , gotta be brave, W.W.M.D., What Would Morgan Do--combined with Gideon shouting down the line at her to _find them, Garcia, do whatever it takes, you’re the expert at this so just find them_ and froze her in her tracks. She knew it was just the same fear that she was feeling speaking, the one that Gideon showed so rarely but felt so deeply, but his unsympathetic demands _were not helpful_. In a rare brave moment, she told him so. He withdrew.

“Just find them, Garcia,” he said. Pleaded.

“I will,” she promised, and hung up so she could call Morgan. When the line dropped out on him and Prentiss, she panicked for a full minute before NYPD surveillance officer Bartleby--steady-as-a-rock Bartleby, bless her--brought her back to reality.

Okay. The team would be fine. She had to believe that. Reid and Rossi were fine, they would be _fine, fine, fine,_ she chanted to herself as she watched an explosion she was miles and minutes too late to stop play out on her screens, resenting the barrier of glass and wire and plastic and silicone in a way that she had never quite resented her babies before. She wanted to find them, oh, she wanted.

But there was a bomber out there, and it was her duty--to Reid and to Rossi--to find him before he could disappear. She clenched her fist and buckled down.  
  
  
  
MORGAN  


The phones were down. Morgan swore when Garcia’s voice, that voice which soothed him even in his panic, cut out, his lifeline vanishing into the dark, and gunned it toward the commotion drawing cop cars and ambulances like a beacon in the night.

 _Please, please,_ he almost prayed. The ones they hadn’t heard from loomed large in his head like monuments. JJ, she was pregnant. She’d been headed to the hotel on the other side of the Federal Building from the scene, but what if--and Reid and Rossi, they’d been together, surely one of their phones would be working, so what did it mean--

 _Not again. Not again._ He pushed thoughts of Boston four years ago out of his head and drove.

He got out of the car already running, flashed his creds at the nearest EMS tech moving at a merely fast instead of frantic clip. “Who’s in charge here?” he barked out.  
  
  
  
ROSSI  


Rossi heard Morgan calling and felt a huge wave of relief sweep over him at this reminder that there was a world beyond this street and the wreckage of their vehicle and Sam and the not-dying-but-not-in-good-shape-either _boy_ in his arms. “MORGAN,” he bellowed as loudly as he could, “OVER HERE.”

Morgan did--something, shouted someone down or profiled them into submission, and slipped the barrier. Rossi could pinpoint the moment he saw Reid, the way his stride changed, the way he was sprinting instead of running now. But he came to a stop several paces away, as though he couldn’t bear to look for himself, a failure of courage uncharacteristic of Morgan, but then they’d all grown protective of Reid, the new, _young_ single father. “Oh my God,” he said.

“’M _fine_ ,” Reid insisted. “Morgan, you’re all right.” Stating the obvious was a bad sign. Not as bad as the way he leaned over and chucked all over Rossi’s patent leather shoes. Rossi didn’t even care, which was when when he realized he might be in shock.

“He, uh, he’s concussed,” Rossi said, dizzy but grim. “Possible internal bleeding. Don’t trust him to evaluate his own injuries and I don’t want to risk moving him. You need to get an ambulance down here.”

“Yeah, I--” Morgan ran a frustrated hand over his scalp. “Damn it, Rossi.”

Yeah. “Derek, this was only the beginning,” Rossi said urgently. “We need to brace for a series of coordinated attacks at each of the target locations--”

“Hey, don’t think about that. Gideon’s on it,” Morgan told him. His phone rang; Morgan flipped it open and started in, “Garcia, I’ve got Reid and Rossi here, but Reid’s hurt, we’ve gotta get someone down here stat--” He paused. Rossi looked up. “What? Are you sure?”

Morgan’s face contorted as he aimed a look over Rossi’s shoulder, right at--

Sam.

“The kid,” Morgan said, and that was all Rossi needed to hear.

“Go,” he snapped out, and Morgan was off, shouting down all of Manhattan as he went. And Rossi was left alone, with Reid, whose face was sheet-white and whose eyes were sliding closed. “No, no,” he said, and gently slapped Reid’s cheeks. “Hey, stay with me, kid.”

He looked back at the barrier. He knew why they weren’t coming. It didn’t staunch the desperation that flooded out of him like a wound, like a fatal blow. “Okay,” he decided. “Okay, Spencer, stay with me. You’ve gotta get up. Stand up--that’s it, kid--steady--”

By some trick of willpower and providence, they got Reid more or less on his feet. Together, they limped towards the security cordon, an old profiler and a kid too young and too necessary for all of this, supporting each other, one step at a time.

By the time a stray ambulance careened onto the scene against orders, there was no one there for them to save.  
  
  
  
PRENTISS  


Gideon couldn’t sit. He paced, arms waving, muttering to himself, hand scrubbing his face periodically as if to wipe away the thoughts clouding his head and start anew. There was a ragged edge of desperation to him that Prentiss had only seen twice, once when Garcia had been shot and once when Frank Breitkopf had set his sights on Gideon and had been willing to carve his way through the team and those he’d saved to get to him. 

When JJ, beautiful JJ, _alive_ JJ swept in, she saw a frisson of relief run through him. Just for a moment, before Garcia clicked on to deliver two gut-punches: Reid was hurt and Morgan was in pursuit of the bomber. Gideon’s hands clenched white where he was leaning on the back of a dun plastic folding chair, government-issue. But something else had clicked in his brain. Abrupt, he leaned in. “Garcia, did you say that the bomber was posing as a bystander?” 

“Yeah, he walked right up to Rossi and Reid, he was right there and they had no idea--”

“No, no, no,” Gideon was saying to himself. “That doesn’t make sense. If he was posing as a bystander he could’ve gotten past the perimeter, and a suicide bombing would’ve taken out Homeland Security and EMS in one attempt. Why did he wait? Why… Why…”

There was something else about the video of Reid and Rossi getting thrown back by the force of the explosion that wasn’t right. She said, “Garcia, the bomb was _under_ their SUV?” Garcia nodded at her, too overcome to speak. “What--why there? Why not go two blocks over and take out 26 Fed?”

“Any news from Joyner?” JJ asked.

“She’s probably still holed up at the mayor’s office,” Garcia said. “They would’ve locked it all down the moment a bombing was reported.”

No help from that quarter. JJ’s warm presence behind her, Gideon’s mumbling at her back, Prentiss turned to the evidence board and wondered what the _hell_ was going on.  
  
  
  
JJ  


Gideon only came back to life when JJ brought back the news that Reid and Rossi were safe and being treated at Lenox Hill Hospital, Rossi for mostly superficial shrapnel wounds and bruised ribs and Reid for a severe concussion and a bit of internal bleeding. He didn’t wait for an invite--in moments he’d bundled up the scraggly remains of the BAU over Brustin’s objections and headed out the door. JJ pretended not to notice when he checked the SUV before hustling them all inside. She got it. She felt a little guilty herself, leaving the safety of the Critical Incident Command Center after _promising_ Will that she would stay out of the field, but it wasn’t really the field, was it? And it was Spence. So she had to.

At the hospital, Rossi had bullied his way out of care and was sitting at Reid’s bedside, medical tape holding a cheek on his cut together. “Dave,” Gideon said in tones of tremendous relief, like only now, seeing them, could he believe that Reid and Rossi were really going to be all right.

“Jason,” Rossi said and pulled him into a hug.

Morgan had beaten them there, keeping watch at the foot of Reid’s bed with his arms crossed and feet apart like a proper bodyguard. “He’ll be all right,” Rossi told them, his own brand of terrible relief thick in his voice. “He’s a little loopy from the pain meds they’re giving him right now, so don’t ask him to do any advanced calculus.”

“I could do advanced calculus in my _sleep_ ,” Reid protested. JJ closed her eyes. It was _so good_ to hear his voice after endless minutes watching that horrible video of him and Rossi being thrown back out of frame on loop. She reached down and took his hand tightly, feeling dizzily more like a mother than when Will had forced her hand about the pregnancy. 

“Which says something about your current condition,” Rossi told him. Gideon moved to the head of Reid’s bed. He swept a hand over Reid’s forehead, brushing away his ridiculous hair. JJ turned away; the moment felt so tenderly paternal that her cheeks burned to look at it.

She understood this about Gideon, too.  
  
  
  
GIDEON  


His attention was brought back to the present by Dave’s voice, hard with an anger he recognized, a _let’s get these bastards, Jason_ anger. They’d made it personal. “What else do we know?”

“Not much more than we did,” Prentiss told them. “Garcia ran ‘Sam’ through ViCAP--nothing. She’s looking through state and local databases at the moment."

But Rossi shook his head, as Gideon had expected. “She’s not going to get a match. These kids are affluent, well-educated, the last people anyone would expect to be caught up in a terror cell--they won’t have records. It’s like trying to ID cult members.”

“So where does that leave us?” Morgan asked.

Gideon closed his eyes. He could almost, almost see the shape of it, but his head had been clouded with adrenaline and fear for so long-- “With the behavior,” he said out loud, trying to talk it out as much for himself as for the others. “We’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off because this bombing didn’t fit the profile. In what ways?”

“It was small-scale,” Morgan said. “One IED for a group organized and prepared enough to pull off the shootings? Not a chance.”

“The geo-profile was off,” Prentiss added. “This bombing was nowhere near the places where they made practice runs. That’s risky, if they’re attacking in a place where they haven’t measured response times.”

“Why you two?” Morgan said. “Gideon’s the unit chief. Joyner’s leading the taskforce. If I wanted to cripple the investigation, that’s where I’d hit, throw the chain of command into chaos until the mayor appoints a new lead.” 

“And why _this van_?” Prentiss asked. “Why not target literally hundreds of other government vehicles, or even a hard target like 26 Fed?”

“Why us?” Rossi said, that old refrain. “Why now?”

Why them, why now? Why _them_ , why _now_? 

“What do we know about the bomb?” Rossi said.

“Bomb techs are still going over it, but their preliminary findings suggest a device no larger than a cell phone,” JJ reported.

“Oxidizing agents,” Reid mumbled. “Chromates, peroxides, perchlorates, chlorates…”

Half out of his mind and still more helpful than most of the NYPD. Gideon closed his eyes, suppressed the fond smile. No time now for distractions, not the torrential relief that had flooded through him when he’d seen his profilers--yes, his _friends_ \--safe and mostly sound, not even pride at the finely-honed clockwork of their minds. He only had room in his head for two questions: Why them, why now?

“Deadly,” Morgan commented.

“Except it wasn’t,” Rossi said. “You saw the wreckage, Morgan. If we’d been inside the car, that blast would’ve killed us. So why are we still alive?”

“He was watching the whole time,” Gideon said, more to himself than to the room at large.

“Yes! Sam--the bomber--he’d have had perfect information on our actions. So why didn’t he wait until we were in the car, maximize the damage? It’s Randy Slade and Shankill Road all over again.”

“Maybe he panicked, got overexcited,” Morgan suggested, but not even he sounded like he believed it.

“Or maybe,” Prentiss said, “it wasn’t meant to kill you.”

They paused; it had the ring of truth. Gideon felt something that had been niggling at him since he’d gotten the news--not of the bombing, but of Reid and Rossi’s survival--slot into place. “Maybe it wasn’t meant to kill you,” he breathed. 

“Why?” JJ asked. “What would that accomplish? Panic, confusion? He’s generated plenty of that already.”

“Exactly,” Gideon said, more pieces of it flying together. “He put the city into a heightened state of security.” It came together faster, faster. “Why only one bomb? Only staging one attack tells us _this_ is the one that mattered.”

“So the rest of it--the shootings, the suicide-by-cop, the Death card--” Morgan said.

“Staging,” Rossi said before Gideon could, finishing his thoughts. “To get the pieces to move to where they needed to be. To get _us_ to where we needed to be.”

“But the effect of all of that was to put the city on high alert. Wouldn’t that make it _more_ difficult for him to pull off his endgame, whatever it is?” Prentiss asked.

“Why you? Why now?” Gideon said. “Why wait to bomb the target until after you go through all the trouble of simulating terrorism? To create a specific set of circumstances, a set of circumstances that is _not_ met when the city is in its normal state. Why not kill? Because the victims needed to be wounded, but alive. And why target federal agents?”

Rossi closed his eyes. “Because we’d do anything--anything--to get one of our own help.”

“Including break protocol,” Morgan said tightly.

“Maybe the miscalculation was in how lightly injured we were,” Rossi said. “Maybe they were aiming for some middle ground between what we thought their goal was--killing us instantly--and what actually happened, which was us getting up and walking away from the blast.”

“Whoever survived the blast would be too grateful to question an ambulance,” Prentiss said. “And too traumatized to follow emergency procedure.”

“And an injured federal agent who’s just been hit by the bombings the city’s so on edge over would instantly become top priority everywhere,” JJ finished.

“Which would make him the perfect Trojan Horse,” Morgan said, shaking his head at how neatly it would all play out.

“A second bomb,” Gideon said. The elegance and extravagance of it pulsed through him. He turned to the figure in the bed, who’d been watching them hazily as they hashed out the truth. He’d tried nodding once, early in the conversation, and quickly stopped when it aggravated his nausea. “Reid, how big would the blast radius be of a bomb that could be concealed in an ambulance?”

“Boom,” Reid mumbled. “Over 120,000 square feet.”

“So maybe it was an attack on Federal Plaza after all?” Prentiss asked doubtfully. He’d certainly have the tonnage to level it, but--it wasn’t right. Not quite. “You’d drive past 26 Fed on your way to St. Barclay’s…”

Rossi stilled. “St. Barclay’s. There’s a Secret Service bypass in effect at St. Barclay’s.”

“What?” Gideon said sharply.

“Yeah, they tried to take us there but we were rerouted because the kid was stable.”

“If we were desperate enough to send an ambulance in, maybe we’d be desperate enough to override the bypass,” Morgan said. “Maybe whoever’s at that hospital is the real target.”

Gideon shook his head. Target, endgame--the puzzle almost fit together, but it was giving way to a much bigger, much scarier question. “It’s irrelevant. What matters now is, having failed to seriously injure one of us, what’s their next move?”

Silence for a moment as they processed the immediate answer that leapt into all their heads.

“Another bombing,” Prentiss said quietly at last.

“They won’t target us again, not when we’re all clustered here at another hospital,” Morgan pointed out.

“So who would they target?” JJ asked.

High-value victims, close to St. Barclay’s, as obvious as possible given the fact they were likely scrambling for a new target now that their exquisitely orchestrated plan had fallen through--“Where’s the Critical Incident Command Center?” Gideon asked urgently.

“Tribeca,” JJ told him. “South of Laight.”

The team was in motion immediately. Gideon’s mind was whizzing forward, thinking about possible outcomes, the chances that a bomber was there already, what they could do if he wasn’t, but he still caught JJ’s aborted movement forward. She hovered on the edge of action, caught by her instinctive reaction to join them and her promise to stay out of the field, made more complicated that the one place she was supposed to be--the CICC--had just become the most dangerous place for her. “Stay with Reid,” he told her. She relaxed back, a hand going involuntarily to her belly. “And stay on the line with Garcia. We’ll keep you updated.”

“Okay,” she said, but they were already gone.  
  
  
  
PRENTISS  


He wasn’t even subtle about it. They caught him toting around a large crate on the steps of the CICC, which had moved their headquarters a grand total of four blocks in the other direction of St. Barclay’s. The moment he realized he was caught he reached for something stuck in the waistband of his jeans, but Morgan had him in a judo hold before he could get there, pulled out his .22 and handed it off to a hovering, white-faced officer. “Not for you,” he snarled. No suicide by cop for this one. In spite of the fact that she had no reason to doubt Morgan’s ability to restrain an offender without harming them, she felt a dizzying relief come over her when the cuffs clicked on, an unmistakable sign that this wouldn’t be like the last time she had a member of this cell cornered. 

Morgan and Rossi, who was _so_ not cleared to be back in the field, took interrogation duties while Gideon oversaw the techs defusing the bomb. That left Prentiss with Garcia, running into endless digital walls as they tried to conjure up an identity for this particular wayward kid, who looked, horrifyingly, as young as Reid.

“Try school records again, Garcia,” Prentiss sighed. The definition of insanity was throwing the same search parameters at a database and expecting different results. “This time look for kids who dropped out of college. We’re trying to find someone whose level of alienation and disillusionment with society would drive him to extremes.”

“I’m trying, but do you know how many kids dropped out of New York City colleges _alone_ in the last year? I need more.”

The problem was, there was no guarantee that the cell members were even local. New York City was a tempting target for terrorists from Brooklyn to Bosnia. Prentiss chewed at her nail beds. On the other side of the mirrored glass, Rossi was trying to piss off the bomber enough to jar him into talking. “You know, most guys like you and your buddies, you sit them down, they can’t shut up about their ‘grand plans.’ Why not you? Are you one of those types that doesn’t care as long as you get to blow something up? Because that’s what it looks like, given what I’ve seen of Sam and your other fallen comrade--sloppy, unfocused… Or do you not _know_ what the endgame is, is that it? Are you just a foot soldier, and the big guys upstairs don’t even bother to tell you what they’re sending you out to die for…”

“Sorry, Em&M, coming up blank on facial recognition,” Garcia crackled back.

Prentiss sighed. It was two in the morning already--Rossi and Reid’s SUV had exploded just after eleven--and she felt an anxious itch in her gut, one that told her that they didn’t have a lot of time before the next attack. Two foiled attempts in, surely the mastermind was getting impatient? She shook herself alert and took a sip of her cold espresso for good measure. “Okay, let’s try this…”

Prentiss marked time by interrogation milestones, which was at least less stressful than paying attention to the unmarked countdown ticking down in her head to an unknown next attack. 2:45, they got him talking. 3:30, they got him on the subject of the ideology of his little domestic terrorism club. Prentiss kept one ear out for any specific tenets or beliefs she could attach to a specific group or name on a watchlist, which she could hopefully then identify the bomber through by tracing through known associates, but it was all pretty generic stuff, blah blah American aggression blah blah capitalist pigs. Until--

“The US government is a _cancer_ on the Earth!” their still-unknown subject ranted. “Spreading war, disease, destruction wherever it goes, expecting even their own people to just lie down and take it-- _Non Revertar Inultus_ , right? _We_ will fight back, _we_ will avenge the millions lost at the hands of this blood-soaked government--”

Prentiss sat up. _Non Revertar Inultus_. I Will Not Return Unavenged. She knew that phrase.

“Hey, Garcia?” she said.

“Uhhnn--” the creaky, disgruntled sounds of Garcia rousing from a micronap echoed through the speakers. “I’m up, I’m up. What nearly-unbelievable magic trick can I attempt for you next?”

“Did any members of the 58th Special Ops Wing of the Air Force die recently?”

Garcia sounded much more alert at the prospect of a new--and, admittedly only obliquely-related to the case--puzzle to solve. “Hmm, let’s see… I’ve got three in the last five years.”

Prentiss said, “Did any of those have younger brothers?”  
  
  
  
Rossi and Morgan broke him before dawn.  
  
  
  
MORGAN  


They missed part-time EMT and cell ringleader Ben Abner at his apartment by less than an hour. The hospital gambit was luckier. Morgan took great pleasure in dragging a cursing, struggling Abner out of the cab of the ambulance he’d just crashed into an--empty, thanks to the BAU’s warning--Secret Service limo and slamming him against the side.

“You made a big mistake,” he snarled in Abner's ear. “You went after the _wrong_ agents.”

Reid was standing--mostly--by the next day. He didn’t seem to notice the way he was faintly swaying as Joyner thanked them again for the way they’d saved the city’s soul (and her job, a part of Morgan thought uncharitably). He wasn’t quite focused on her either, though that might not have been the concussion; it hadn’t escaped Morgan’s notice that Reid had been uncomfortable around pretty, blond Joyner, who bore a striking resemblance to the woman in Reid’s photos, from the moment they’d set foot in the station. They got him bundled up into the SUV, stopped just long enough for Prentiss to tie up whatever thing she had going with the NYPD detective who’d gotten shot, and were on the way back to Quantico by two in the afternoon. Rossi and Reid were both contraindicated from flying after what the explosion had done to their eardrums, so out of solidarity they sent the plane on ahead and headed down in a little two-SUV convoy, Morgan at one wheel and Gideon grudgingly at the other now that their other usual driver was laid up with bruised ribs.

It was soothing to Morgan, being able to look in the rearview mirror and see Reid napping on Garcia’s shoulder. His face was scraped to hell, his abdomen was covered in blue-black blotches where the internal bleeding had been, but he was wearing clean, reassuringly ugly clothes from his go-bag and stirred every now and then to give drowsy opinions on JJ and Garcia’s quiet chatter. Hell of a first year on the job, Morgan thought ruefully. Most people at least waited until their second year to get dangerously injured.

They were talking weekend plans now. “I don’t know about you, but when I get home, I’m going to sleep for about a week,” Morgan put in.

JJ groaned. “Oh, wow, sleep sounds great right now.” They’d been up all night tracking down the cell leader; only by upping his regular coffee order from a double-shot to a triple was he able to keep himself road-ready now.

Garcia, who had managed to snag catnaps when the rest of the team was deep in the profiling hole, lucky girl, chirped, “Of course, gotta keep JJJ happy.”

“JJJ?” JJ said incredulously.

“JJ Junior.” Garcia poked in the general direction of JJ’s belly for emphasis. JJ flushed, her thoughts seeming to stutter. 

“Of course,” she mumbled, her cheeks still red. She regrouped and launched a counteroffensive, “What about you, Garcia? Any plans? Any… hot, geeky, plans of the male variety?”

It would take a while for her to adjust to the knowledge that they were all aware of the baby, Morgan knew; JJ was so intensely private, even, he suspected, from Will. Hell, it’d take Morgan a while to adjust to the idea of JJ, pregnant. Another BAU baby after Jack had stormed in and swept their hearts. Jeez.

And he knew then that he would never trade this for anything. This, his team safe and more or less sound, heading back home after a grueling but ultimately satisfying case, the sound of chatter about shoe sales filling his ears--this was who he was. It was why he was still here now that Rossi had confirmed the vague inkling at the back of his mind that he could go anywhere, why he hadn’t buckled when the BAU invaded his home and life and sense of self, why he was still here and Elle was not. Joyner could have the New York Field Office; this was where he was meant to be. They crossed over into Virginia and the setting sun painted the sky behind them in golds and reds. JJ’s complaints about how different the city was when you were visiting it for work drifted up to him like sweet music. “And I was expecting to at least be able to grab take-out from that Ethiopian place I liked so much, but it turned out it closed,” she sighed.

“That’s New York,” Garcia said sympathetically.

“The subways were cleaner than I expected them to be,” Reid said, his eyes still closed.

JJ paused. “Wait--Spence, don’t tell me that this was your first time in New York?”

“No,” Reid said. “It was my second.”

Morgan laughed and laughed until the very moment he and Garcia deposited a limping Reid into the worried, somewhat exasperated arms of Jessica Brooks.  
  
  
  
ROSSI  
The New York fiasco kicked off one of those stretches when the cases came thick and fast, sometimes even two a week, that lasted until the end of September. This was made about ten times more difficult by the fact that Reid and Rossi were benched for a couple of weeks at least and JJ was officially, unquestionably out of the field and had the paperwork to prove it. Prentiss, Gideon, and Morgan spent the first half of September running themselves ragged over an arsonist, a high-profile home invasion, and two killers in two separate psychotic breaks triggered by a pharmaceutical mix-up. Prentiss hadn’t even been with the BAU yet the last time they’d had this few profilers out in the field, when Adrian Bale had blown up half the team and Gideon’s post-traumatic nosedive had drawn Rossi out of retirement. 

Because Rossi was a bleeding heart (and a workaholic), he was back on the jet only a week and a half after New York, having bullied a doctor into signing his return to duty. His first outing back was the case of the copycat who was somehow leaving a dead serial killer’s semen on the scene--he would give it a snappier name for the book--and he, too, felt the strain. His acoustic trauma had healed up nicely, but his heart still leapt at loud noises--he didn’t _spook_ , he was too professional for that--he still paused before he got into the SUV’s driver’s seat, and he kept looking over, expecting to see Reid, and feeling his heart briefly race in the moment between seeing nothing and remembering that Reid was at the office. Reid was firmly barred from the field for another week at least while his concussion healed, not to mention the internal bleeding. Rossi would get over these trifles eventually. It was just trauma. Hardly his first time coming down from a traumatic event. Still, while it was happening, it sucked.

He didn’t think about the pulsing _horror_ that had shot through him in those moments when he’d thought Reid might be dead. That moment when he’d transformed from SSA David Rossi--who could brush off anything except orphaned kids, the man who’d sacrificed the best things of his life at the altar of his ambition, that heartless SOB who’d needed to come out of retirement because he’d been the only one unfazed enough by the sudden, awful loss of six agents and a hostage to take the reins of the BAU after Boston--into a man as frightened and lost as a civilian. That fear. That wrenching pain, almost like losing James before he could even take his first breath. It didn’t compute, didn’t fit with the person Rossi understood himself to be. He’d seen colleagues in danger before, had even lost a few in the line of duty. But now this. First his hands had shaken when Penelope had been shot, and now this, the ghost of might-have-been lingering over a case he ought to be able to neatly pack away.

He was going soft, he judged. This team, which profiled together and ate together and mourned together and watched each other’s backs, was making him soft. He didn’t like it.

But it was easy to forget that when they were on the hunt, or laughing about John Wayne Gacy’s clown paintings, or Prentiss had held up a letter purporting to be from the dead killer and sighed, “Where’s Reid when you need him,” and, like magic, he’d flickered to life on the screen behind Garcia to dispense nuggets of handwriting-analysis wisdom from faraway Quantico, only squinting a little at the light from the screen, still breathing on Garcia’s neck. Even if what he had to say was not helpful. An authentic missive from the corpse formerly known as the Angel Maker indeed. Then the bones went missing. Wonderful. As if the town needed another reason to descend into a full-blown frenzied panic.

They narrowed the suspect pool down to a hybristophilic fan, and Rossi sat next to the connection with Reid and Garcia and sifted through mountains of fan letters with latex gloves and a sour expression. Who obsessively loved a serial murderer? The answer, it seemed, was a number that could be the population of a small railway depot town in the Western US.

He voiced this opinion to Garcia and she said, devastatingly, “Well, it’s not that different from your books, right?”

“What,” he said.

Reid had turned huge startled eyes onto Garcia and from the way he was moving was nudging her with his knee to shut her up. “You know, one minute you’re buying true crime, the next minute you’re writing a fan letter, it’s just that most of them go to you,” she said airily. A pause. “Oh no. Wait. Sir, I didn’t mean--”

“Yeah, well,” Rossi said with good humor, “at least my fans have never killed anyone.” Garcia’s words buried itself deep into his brain and--itched, though. He thought of Jill Morris, months ago in Philadelphia, ruthlessly using the deaths of women just like her to advance her own career. He thought of the way most of the agents milling around Quantico and various field offices looked at him with awe, but a few with a deep suspicion and disgust. Fame and power and control.

He shoved it all away and returned to the case.

Reid found a code, then proceeded to decode it apparently by hand with Garcia complaining that they could use a genetic algorithm all the while. Honestly, Rossi was increasingly beginning to forget how they’d gotten along without him. “Sure you got the right factory parts for his quarterly tune-up?” Prentiss murmured to him.

“’The day the verdict was read, we shared a silent moment,’” Gideon read from the papers Reid had scanned over, the decrypted letters in his old familiar chicken-scratch. “’We shared a silent moment…’”

“She was in the courtroom with him,” Morgan said.

“Guys, there’s something else,” JJ said, holding her own Angel Maker-via-Reid letter. “I think she got pregnant.”

Chloe Kelcher, the only woman who had been sitting in that room who got pregnant around the time she’d sent a letter about “the future taking root.” Cortland Kelcher, who had died eight days after birth from complications caused by neonatal hepatic steatosis. When she heard, JJ bit her lip and looked down. Rossi empathized, but it was rusty, distant--it had been such a long time since he, too, had felt acutely every threat and danger to babies in the world at large.

On the screen, Reid stared at a point of the constellation of pink that was Garcia’s desk. Maybe that feeling of personal investment in each and every child never faded for parents, but simply deepened and hardened in their hearts. Rossi wouldn’t know.

Chloe Kelcher committed suicide by cop, but they saved her fourth and final victim and the sheriff’s girlfriend gave them chocolate chip cookies for the plane, so at least it wasn’t a total loss. Rossi chewed and thought about motive and celebrity and what made some people fall in love with serial killer stories and some people fall in love with serial killers.  
  
  
  
Reid didn’t leave the office until nearly the end of the month, when Gideon sent him and Prentiss out on a mild job interviewing potential child sexual abuse victims on a cult compound. They were the two newest profilers, but they still had more than enough experience to deal with something this straightforward, if wrenching, while the rest of the team scrambled to catch up with the work that had piled up during their staffing bottleneck. They’d be back by the end of the day. They didn’t even take the plane, in case an urgent case came up and the rest of the team had to jet off somewhere else.

When Morgan screamed, “GIDEON!” across the bullpen, Rossi’s heart started to pound and would not slow again for three days.  
  
  
  
They were at the Separatarian sect ranch by noon.

The first horrible thing happened two minutes after they’d clambered out of the SUVs and surveyed the pretty, red-roofed compound where two of their friends were being held captive, hopefully, if they hadn’t been--anyway. Gideon hopped out of the passenger side door, already moving toward the command center, and barked out, “Dave, I want you to take the lead with hostage negotiation.”

“Me? What. No,” Rossi said.

As denials went, it could’ve been more elegant, maybe elegant enough to stop Gideon from steamrollering over all of his protestations, “I know, I know. But you were there at Waco, you’re the very best at negotiating releases from captivity, and we need the best, Dave, we need the best.”

“So why don’t you do it?” Rossi sputtered.

“I’m emotionally compromised.”

“And I’m not?” he said incredulously.

“Dave,” he said, “please.”

Rossi heard the unspoken: I trust you more than I trust myself. The problem was that Rossi was no longer sure if he trusted himself.

The second horrible thing happened during his first conversation with cult leader Cyrus. “One of them is dead,” Cyrus intoned, and then, like it made any difference at all, “It wasn’t us,” like the fact that the bullet came from a statie’s gun would matter to Prentiss’s mother, or to little Jack, who’d already lost so much, so much, or to the BAU--

\--the car on fire, Reid’s limbs splayed like a doll’s--

He paused for too long, he knew that. His hands were clenched on the table to either side of the phone and if they didn’t shake it was only because he was grinding his knuckles into the cheap plastic of the table. Cyrus’s tone voice took on that faux-pious, lofty tone, “I have faith in the eternal heaven that awaits--”

“What was their name,” he croaked out. Praying. Heavenly father, I come before you in need of hope. Not them. Not them.

“Nancy Lunde,” Cyrus said, and the world started to spin once more.

His knees went watery. His grip on the table tightened so that he wouldn’t buckle then and there. Eyes closed, not sure of how he managed to get out the words in a fairly normal tone, he said, “Thank you, Benjamin. We’ll take care of notifying her family.”

In that same week-kneed state of relief, he arranged to deliver medical supplies to the chapel on autopilot. He knew Gideon was looking at him as he signed off. That he and Morgan and JJ had noticed that awful moment when he’d felt the possible hole carved into the team as the traumatic loss of his own flesh and he’d lost control of the conversation. I told you, he wanted to snap at Gideon. I said so, didn’t I? Reid and Prentiss--and all those other people, too, his conscience added--needed the best. Not a hostage negotiator with a hazy head and unsteady hands. Not a man who felt grateful for the death of an innocent woman because it meant his own friends were breathing.

Still, no one said anything to him about how far he’d sunk. Not even Morgan, who had no patience for investigators pushing themselves in a way that would endanger others, had done anything more than protest that he should accompany Rossi when he delivered the supplies, for safety if nothing else.

He took the supplies up to the sect alone, partly to build trust, like he’d said to Morgan when he’d tried to tag along, partly because he knew he would be next to useless until he had confirmation that Prentiss and Reid--Reid, who had only been cleared to be back in the field _yesterday_ , Reid, whose life was in his hands once again, he felt a terrible desire to crawl out of his own skin and run and leave a better, stronger David Rossi to save the day--were in one piece. Cyrus met him by the bloodstained front doors, instantly distinguishable not only by his voice or the photo Garcia had sent over on the plane, but also because of his cold brown eyes. The gaze of a megalomaniac sociopath.

Setting eyes on Prentiss and Reid--disheveled, but all right--was the sweetest sensation he’d felt in recent memory.

He couldn’t let his eyes linger too long. Feeling at last alert enough to act the part of a disinterested FBI agent who didn’t know them at all, he tore his gaze away and took in the children sitting in neat rows and the men with assault weapons standing sentry--four or five hardcore believers, but the bulk of the population was sitting in the pews. Thirty, maybe forty in all. With a pang, he thought that Reid could give him an exact estimate. “I’d hoped you’d let me take the children,” he told Cyrus.

“Nah, they’re our protection. I remember Waco,” Cyrus said softly. “We all do.”

“And the social workers?” he dared.

Cyrus’s eyes flickered to Prentiss and Reid. They stared back, watchful, poised. Slouch, Rossi wanted to shout at them. Quake, make a scene, act like social workers who’ve never heard gunfire before. “Them too,” he smiled. “In case the deterrence of attacking the children of strangers is not enough.”

The third terrible thing was what he read in Benjamin Cyrus’s eyes in that rare moment of clarity, the relief of seeing Prentiss and Reid unharmed having briefly drowned the terror. It occupied his thoughts all the way back to the command center. “We’re not going to be able to negotiate peaceful surrender. He’s ready to become a martyr,” he announced grimly to the team. “I can buy us time, but that’s it. We need to prepare to send in a tactical assault.”  
  
  
  
PRENTISS  
Being a hostage was boring. There were moments of incredible stress, like when Cyrus had faked a mass suicide and she and Reid had nearly thrown their covers to the wind in an attempt to stop them. Mostly, it was long stretches of nothing, of sitting and watching the men make preparations and trying to scrape from their motions the bare minimum of information about their plans, the sexual accusations, what was going on outside. 

This changed on the second day of the stand-off. She and Reid had been left in one of the tunnels to quietly discuss the legalities of a parent retroactively withdrawing her consent for her underage daughter to marry an adult. It was hard to tell with whispers, but cadence alone, Reid said, seemed to tip the odds in favor of fifteen-years-old Jessica Evanson’s mother having made the sexual abuse distress call in her name. Jessica was bold, fierce, above all _indoctrinated._ She wouldn’t have whispered a plea for help to a phone line in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t have asked for help at all. But her mother _had_ consented to her marriage with Cyrus. Prentiss was trying to remember the specifics of an Iowa case in which guardianship had passed to an aunt who’d objected to her niece’s underage marriage when Cyrus stormed downstairs.

“Which one of you is it?” he said, his voice steady and crackling as a storm about to break.

She and Reid exchanged looks, searching each other for any hint as to what Cyrus was looking for. So far, he’d shown no signs of psychosis or extreme paranoia, but the anger coiled in his frame said that something had pushed him irretrievably towards violence, a violence aimed squarely at herself and Reid.

“Which one of you,” he said slowly, “is the FBI agent?”

 _No_ , she thought, and then _Thank god_ , the other one would be safe, and then _But what if it’s a trap_ and he was waiting to see whether they’d fess up that they both were agents or prove themselves duplicitous. Reid stuttered out a denial. Cyrus pulled a gun from his waistband and aimed it at Reid’s forehead. Her questions became academic at that point.

“Tell me the truth,” Cyrus said, with the heavy weight of a man who didn’t need _or else_ s to make himself feared.

Not this time, she thought. Reid had a son and was twenty-six and had had a near-death experience _just three weeks ago_ , so it was her turn now. Not _this_ time. “Me,” she said.

Reid opened his mouth as if to protest and she shot him a look that was not quite a glare but was clear in its desperation. _Let me_ , she thought at him fiercely enough that after a moment he seemed to get the message and closed his mouth, shakily pulling himself back in check. Prentiss didn’t blame him; he hadn’t even been doing this for a year, of course his first instinct was to not let her sacrifice herself, to ignore the profile and lay bare the truth in the hopes that Cyrus would show mercy to them both. Prentiss knew better, and a part of her--a very small part--relaxed once she had Reid’s silent promise he’d play along.

Cyrus missed all of this. He’d had turned to look at her, an almost benevolent cast to his brow. Then his hand reached out and grabbed her by her hair and yanked her off the seat.

Against her will, she cried out, trying desperately to catch Reid’s eye under Cyrus’s arm, to tell him to play along, even now, let her reap the consequences of her choice. He’d half-risen to his feet, his lips parted in horror, but one of Cyrus’s burly retinue aimed an assault rifle in his direction and he desisted. Satisfied that he wouldn’t do anything stupidly heroic and get them both killed, Prentiss turned her attention towards trying to survive the next few moments.

Cyrus backhanded her and sent her crashing into a shelf. That was a good sign, she figured, trying frantically to think through the buzzing in her head the blow had left. If he was playing with her that meant he wasn’t going to kill her, at least not now--no bets on whether he’d make a ceremony of it later--hopefully the team outside would keep him too busy to sacrifice her or whatever the hell he had planned--

Oh, god, she thought as he slammed her into the mirror. It shattered and she shouted as small sharp fragments sunk past her shirt and into her flesh. The team outside. The parabolic mics. They didn’t have the same cues that she did, they’d have no idea whether he was going to torture her or just kill her right there--”I can take it,” she gritted out in as clear and firm a voice as she could manage, hoping the mics would pick it up. “I can take it.”

“Oh, you can take it?” Cyrus sneered, and punched her in the kidneys. Ugh, she thought. Even his beatings had a desultory cast to them, like this was just an inconvenient bump in the road to Paradise. “You can take it?”

“I can take it,” she gasped out, and hoped that, like Reid, the others would get her message.

God, her kidneys hurt, though.  
  
  
  
Thank Jesus, Kathy Evanson was charged with her care. It was the end of the second day when she helped her limp back down to the chapel, which was packed as full as when they’d drunk the supposedly poisoned wine during Cyrus’s little loyalty test. She watched him carefully for signs of whatever was to come: another mass suicide rehearsal? The real deal? “He looks pissed,” she whispered to Reid when he drifted over, thankfully looking exactly as unkempt as before.

He didn’t say anything. She glanced back at him; he was staring at her with a complicated expression. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Prentiss said, exasperated. Thought it did look pretty bad--Kathy had brought her a mirror after she’d been cleaned up a bit, and that shiner was going to be with her for a while.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said softly.

“Stop it. It was my choice. And it was the best thing to do. You know that.”

“It should’ve been me,” he murmured, and she felt a hot tongue of rage flicker up inside her.

“And what would that have gotten us? Maybe Cyrus wouldn’t have had the same hang-ups about shooting a man in cold blood. Maybe you’d be dead right now. Maybe most of the people around us would, if they’d sent out a strike team. You know what the profile says about guys like these, Reid. Narcissistic chivalrous misogynists like Cyrus abuse women. They don’t kill them. You have to trust it.”

“I do,” he said quietly. “It just… should’ve been me.”

“Hey,” she said, “self-sacrifice isn’t actually an attractive quality. People need you, Reid.”

“People need you, too, Emily,” Reid said, and the way he said it made her feel the _I need you, the team needs you_ in her bones.

At the front, Cyrus was reading names off from his loyalty list. In one swoop, he’d weeded out the weakest third of his follower base, and solidified his hold on the remaining cult members. It was a good strategic move--concede to the negotiator’s requests with people whose absence would make his position more absolute. “What got him to give in?” she whispered.

“Gideon said he’d demilitarize the situation, pull back the the Critical Incident Response Group personnel, leave it just them and the sheriffs.”

“Gideon?” she said, taken aback. “I thought Rossi--that was why he brought the supplies, right?”

“Gideon took over,” Reid said quietly. “I heard him over the phone.”

She bit her lip. “I think I have an in with Kathy Evanson,” she said. “I just need to know what they’re planning.”

Reid was looking at Cyrus. “Leave it to me.”  
  
  
  
Reid must’ve somehow indicated to their listeners outside that Cyrus was approaching his endgame, because just after nightfall the red light of a sniper scope appeared on her wall. Must be Morgan, she thought fondly. Only he would do something as insane as communicate critical tactical information through a glorified laser-pointer.

So, they were moving at 3AM, which would be more helpful if they’d put a clock in her room. She begged Kathy Evanson to do the right thing, for her daughter’s sake, hoped it had been enough. And waited.

At ten to three, she roused. A strong, callused hand was on her shoulder, shaking her awake. Kathy. “You were right,” she said, a whine of panic stringing through her voice. “They’re setting the place to blow up. Come on, we gotta go, we gotta go right now--”

Prentiss let her lead her down to where the woman and children were milling about the tunnels, confused and groggy. Jessica was there, holding the two-year-old who’d lost her parents in the gunfight that had started all of this. “Wait--” Prentiss gasped out, looking for a familiar head of floppy hair and not finding anything-- “Reid, the man I came in with--”

But Kathy’s iron grip on her shoulder forced her further down the tunnels. “Wait,” she gasped out, but her head hurt and her face hurt and her ribs hurt and it came out more like a breath than a protest.

And then, air. The knot of people burst outside, heavily-armored tactical response personnel streaming in the opposite direction; she heard a flash-bang go off behind her, the little girl in Jessica’s arms was sobbing, wailing, and then there was Morgan, resplendent in his FBI-blue vest, his hands on her arms, steadying her, like something right out of her prayers. “Emily,” he breathed.

She wanted to weep for relief. Instead, she forced out, “Reid’s still inside, he’s with Cyrus--the building’s wired to blow, you’ve gotta get him out--”

From behind Morgan, Rossi reached for her. “Emily, you’ve got to get clear--”

“No, we have to get _Reid!”_

“Prentiss, I swear, I’ll get Reid,” Morgan promised. “You _get clear._ ”

Behind her, Jessica’s voice raised in fury, “Cyrus didn’t call for this! You _lied_ to me!”

Kathy reached out but Jessica bolted off back into the tunnels, Kathy screamed, tried to run after her, but Rossi caught her in his arms and Morgan barked out, “Ma’am, I will get her for you, but you’ve got to stay back,” before he, too, plunged into the tunnels from which smoke was just now beginning to waft over their heads.

Prentiss let Rossi hustle her and Kathy down the steps, her head turned back as though she could catch a glimpse of Morgan and Reid coming out of the smoke triumphant, until they were down the hill and looking up at where the chapel’s lights blazed against the night. She waited for long minutes, Rossi gone to corral some of the others away from the blast zone. She waited and thought, _I did not take that beating to lose the two of you like this._

A huge roar of sound. The building went up.

“Reid! Morgan!” she cried out desperately. The smoldering wreck that had once been the chapel did not answer.

“Reid,” she said, helpless this time. “Morgan.”

Like a miracle, two coughing shadows stumbled from the hazy wreckage of the Separatarian sect. One was dressed in a bulletproof vest and moved swiftly and surely over the debris with an air of long experience. The other was stumbling, flat-footed in dress shoes, his floppy, ridiculous hair falling into his eyes. She floated towards him slowly. He looked up, caught her gaze, and his arms around her were sweet, so sweet, proof that this was no mirage but Reid, trembling with life and adrenaline, in her arms.

“Kid,” Morgan said behind them, amused, “you really need to stop this habit you’re developing of getting yourself into mortal peril.”

“Amen,” Prentiss whispered. Reid laughed wetly into her shoulder.

When they broke apart, she caught sight of where Morgan had made his way over to speak to Kathy Evanson. Prentiss watched her face crumple, her whole body crumple, as though it was too much to even stand in the face of whatever he was telling her. A cold chill shot through her, though Reid was warm and present at her side. She thought it was a good thing she hadn’t taken in Carrie Ortiz, from those home invasions a year ago, after all. Who could protect anyone anyway?  
  
  
  
JJ  
It was late when JJ interrupted Morgan’s idle flirtations with Prentiss to hustle them all off to Sherwood, Nevada. She was unmistakably pregnant now. As if her body had been awaiting her permission, she’d ballooned outward in the month since she’d told the team. Her maternity clothes had swiftly stopped being slightly stretchier versions of her normal outfits and started being a necessity.

In the third trimester, babies could recognize the voices around them, her obstetrician had told her. Slightly horrified by this, JJ began to wear headphones over her belly when they were debriefing. "I personally preferred Mozart, myself," Reid chirped when she explained on the plane. "But be careful to limit his exposure to one hour a day, amniotic fluids have a tendency to amplify sound."

After the case with the sheriff who was a little too impressed by JJ, who rarely received compliments on her professionalism when she wasn’t roughly the size of a beach ball, she found that someone had left CDs of _Mozart in the Morning, Mozart: The Complete Symphonies,_ and _Hotel California_ on her desk. In spite of the fact that half of what came out of his mouth when he talked to her now were dire warnings of all the ways her pregnancy could go wrong, Spencer could be surprisingly sweet when he put his mind to it.

In California, her offhand comment about the baby’s unusual restlessness, like he could tell the rest of the team was having adventures all over the state and wanted to join in instead of being confined to the Sacramento field office with JJ and her gigantic belly, sparked another one of those mini-lectures which were both sweet, in that Reid had to have read up on pregnancy just for her, and disturbing. "In the third trimester, there's an average of thirty fetal movements per hour," he rattled off. "Babies kick to explore movement and strengthen muscle."

“Did Jack’s mom appreciate it when you came out with little tidbits like that during her pregnancy?” JJ asked, amused.

Reid looked down. “I, uh. Wasn’t around when Jack’s mom was pregnant.”

Oh, Spence. Deliberately light, JJ said, “So you’ve never actually felt a baby kick, then?” and without waiting for an answer reached over and guided Reid’s hand to her belly. He frowned intently as the baby roiled a bit in response to this new touch.

“Doesn’t that freak you out?” he asked.

“No,” JJ laughed. “Why, does it freak you out?”

“Very much so,” Reid said, still frowning, and withdrew.

JJ petted her belly, suddenly a little melancholy and acutely aware that she was alone for the first time in five hectic, nonstop weeks with the only person she could talk to about it. “Of all the things that freak me out about this, that’s the least of them. Spence… you’ve been on the team for almost a year now.”

“247 days,” he corrected her. JJ did the math: just over eight months. God, they’d flown by. It felt like Reid had been here forever.

Hesitantly, she asked, “Did you ever… when you had Jack… did you ever doubt that you could be a good father for him?”

“JJ, in the 247 days I’ve known you, it’s been made eminently clear to me that you’ll be a great mother.”

“I’m just scared,” she whispered.

“Of what?”

“That it’ll change. That it’ll all change. And that I won’t be--ready--I’ll just be left adrift.”

Spencer took her hand, awkward but comforting. “I’ve nearly been killed three times since I joined the team, did you know that?” he asked wryly.

JJ laughed tautly. “I wasn’t counting at the time; I was busy praying, I think.”

“What I never expected,” he said slowly, as if he was sounding out every word for the rightness of it, “is that when you have a kid, your whole reason for living changes. It’s instant, this total change in who you are. When you’re in the field, the reason you’re determined to make him out alive is the thought of him. You don’t think, _I need to see my mom again_ or _I need to see…_ insert significant other again. Or, you do, but those are secondary thoughts. You’re just filled with this overwhelming sense that you can’t die, because what will your baby do? This can’t be the end, it just can’t be, because of him. You gave up every other option you had the moment he came into your life.”

JJ felt something awful like panic, but worse, rise up in the back of her throat. She took a shuddering breath, the enormity of it threatening to overwhelm her. “That’s… terrifying. Spence, you don’t understand, I have commitment issues coming out of my ears. Six months ago I was ready to break up with Will because we were getting too serious.” Her vision had gone teary. Damn hormones. “It’s too big, it’s--I’m not ready for my life to be about someone else. Oh, God, I’ll be terrible.”

“I thought the same thing, I swear,” he said, gentle, like he was soothing a spooked horse. “It happens so fast you don’t even notice it. The moment he’s in your arms. The moment he becomes real, becomes _yours_. Everything else fades away. And it feels like the most natural thing in the world.”

“How do you do it?” she sighed. “How do you do… what we do and get home and be the father your son needs?”

He squeezed her hand thoughtfully. “You asked me that a few months ago,” he said. That night in his living room, drinking club soda and watching the others start up a game of poker for pennies. JJ remembered. “I didn’t realize why at the time.”

“You weren’t meant to,” JJ said, a hint of humor returning to her voice.

Reid ducked his head bashfully. “I know. But I might have a better answer for you now.”

“Shoot,” JJ said honestly. She’d heard all the lectures from her mother, read--well, some of the books--stared with greedy eyes at all the parents she came across in the street as if some of their ease and skill could rub off on her. 

“The key,” he said, “is admitting you can’t compartmentalize everything. The life you have at home affects who you are at work, and the things you see at work affect who you are at home. You’ve just got to… accept that, and use it. When I see a parent who’s lost a child--I think about Jack, and I--and it’s hard and it hurts, it does. But I walk away knowing that I understood that pain more fully than I ever could’ve before I had Jack. That I shared the pain better. You bring the baggage home, but you channel it. You give your son a fun evening doing jigsaw puzzles because you need to see him smile. You teach him empathy and compassion and to always do the right thing. And JJ. Profiler or not, you are one of the most empathetic and compassionate people I know. You’ll be great. I _promise_.” 

“Thank you, Spence,” she said, soft, steadier. He smiled at her and turned back to where he’d been staring at the map on which he’d plotted all of the home invasions so far. She rubbed at her bump after a particularly vigorous kick and mentally tallied, with greater calm, everything that still needed to change before the Big One.

When they got back from Sacramento, she called SSA Jordan Todd with a job offer.  
  
  
  
Things calmed after that, a relief as walking got harder and the baby got rowdier. There was a dicey situation in October when documents describing several murders in loving, lavish detail appeared online, ostensibly as a work of fiction but too close to some real crime scenes for comfort, which turned out to be a very disturbed seventeen-year-old boy lurking around to catch the aftermath of run-of-the-mill DC violence. It was Rossi who figured out they were looking for a budding psychopath rehearsing his killing fantasy, Gideon who persuaded the neighbors in the comfort zone to come clean about the quiet, intense boy who went to the Morton School, but it was Reid who got through to troubled Nathan Harris, who convinced him to be voluntarily committed. 

On Halloween, a boy went missing. The team consulted on the case from Quantico. No use making the five-and-a-half-hour flight when they already had so little time. He was found dead in the desert a week later.

In November, they made the trip to Las Vegas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If there are clear markers in the episode itself about dates, I go by those, even if it means rearranging the episode order. The one exception is “Machismo,” which, according to the dates of the murders, must take place in November 2006; but by November 2006 not only has Elle stopped wearing long hair, she’s left the BAU. Based on the calendar hanging in the background in certain scenes in “Limelight,” it must take place in January; “Elephant’s Memory” takes place in April based on the dialogue, and Reid refers to the events of “3rd Life” as having taken place about a month ago, so March.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence."  
> \--Sholem Asch

As they were waiting for the coroner to finish dotting his Is and crossing his Ts so they could bring the completed ME’s report to Gideon, Reid asked, “Do you ever get… like, dreams?”

Morgan’s eyebrows shot up. Instantly, Reid regretted his phrasing. He wouldn’t rib about what _kind_ of dreams he might be referring to, not on a child abduction case, which already felt so palpably different from any other case Reid had worked with the team, but Reid could tell he was thinking about it. “I mean, nightmares,” he said hastily. The word hung there in the air, swollen and awkward. “Do you ever get nightmares, I mean?”

Morgan looked him up and down. Reid knew what he would see--the pallor, the bruises pressed under his eyes, hardly difficult for someone to profile. “Is this about the Separatarian sect?” he asked gently, which was all the more galling because it was wrong.

“No. Sorry. Forget it.”

“Reid.” Morgan still sounded unbearably gentle. Sometimes he would soften like that for Reid, like he’d appointed himself his protector. Reid mostly chafed at that feeling--he didn’t need protection. Now, feeling fragile and still seeing the bodies of dead boys behind his eyelids, like he had ever since they’d discovered the first victim’s body out in the desert two days ago, he welcomed it. “You been having nightmares?”

He bit his lip. If he said he’d been having them since they’d been on this case, Morgan would suggest he take himself off it, and that was the last thing he wanted to do, the last thing he needed. “For a while. I used to get them every now and then, but lately…” Every night. Every day. Every time I close my eyes. 

“Reid, I think you should tell Rossi and Gideon about this.”

“What?” That was--ridiculous. He knew the team was babying him, had been ever since he’d gotten injured in New York, and the stand-off in Colorado certainly hadn’t helped matters. The very last thing he needed was for his bosses to get in on the hysteria, for Rossi and Gideon to think he was--cracking up, or worse, _unstable_ \--“No. No, I’m fine. I’m fine.”

Morgan opened his mouth to say something along the lines of _You don’t look fine_ , and relief washed over Reid when the ME strode back in, saving him from whatever prickly, friendship-destroying thing would have surely come out of his mouth in return. For all that Reid had struggled the first twenty-four years of his life to form meaningful relationships, he’d always had a vicious talent for ending them.

He pretended not to notice Morgan glancing at him out of the corner of his eye as they drove back. Now Morgan thought he was losing it. Morgan, though, knew what it was like to feel like you had to prove yourself every minute of every day. He wouldn’t tell anyone.  
  
  
  
They got back to the Bridges house just as the next taunting phone call came. He was tired--exhausted, really, that bone-deep weariness of your third all-nighter in a row as you scrambled to make sure you were prepared to defend your dissertation in front of a panel mostly made up of people you’d shown up at one point or another and who would love to prove that your ambitions were too much for you after all, or of long nights as someone you loved’s mission ran long and the endless wait for it to be done at last so that he could come home to you--but his mind instantly began to file away aspects of the unsub’s demeanor. Voice-changing software; could be a basic forensic countermeasure in case he did get caught, he wouldn’t want something as simple as recordings of his voice to give him away in front of the court, or could have been more immediately practical--someone the Bridges knew? Someone whose voice they’d recognize. Attitude was mocking, but not quite competitive, no element of “you couldn’t keep your child safe from me,” instead focusing on the parents’ imagined inaction now, after the abduction had already occurred; unusual in MOs which involved taunts to the family members. An almost vicious glee in causing the parents pain.

Amy Bridges recoiled when the voice on the other end of the phone ground out, “He’s in a better place now,” and suddenly Spencer’s mind was blank, blank, imagining getting his own phone call from someone who had _his son_ , someone taunting him over the phone while he had Jack at his mercy, and he wondered, how had Aaron--how had he survived it--how was this woman surviving it--

But Amy was remarkably poised for someone whose life had suddenly and obviously lost all meaning, not rising to the bait. Reid liked that about her. It reminded him of Aaron, of how he, too, must’ve been steady and focused when someone who had control of his son was mocking him, more intent on how to keep Jack alive than on his own rage and pain and panic. Reid shook himself. He didn’t need more reasons to project himself onto these parents, this family, not when he needed to be objective, not when they needed him to be objective.

Still, he couldn’t help but feel pleased when JJ put a hand on Amy’s arm (there was something that was just inexplicably more comforting about her presence now that she was pregnant, something that spoke to cozy spaces and warm nest-dens in the animal hindbrain), a gladness that she was in good hands. He wanted her to be all right. He had no illusions about why.

“Can I… talk to him?” Amy managed to eke out even when Gideon’s hand had fallen still on the legal pad he was writing on to prompt her, paralyzed by the horror of what ‘He’s in a better place now’ could mean.

“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” the unsub snapped. “He knows what a bad mother you are. Your three minutes are up.”

 _Three_ minutes--that specificity was interesting--his concentration broke as Amy trod an unsteady path back to the master bedroom to sink back into the depressive fugue which Reid could tell had consumed her ever since she got the news. JJ prodded her husband, Craig, to follow her. Trying to buttress their support systems in a time of incredible strain, Reid knew. And also trying to get him out of the room so that the profilers could share the more lurid details with each other without civilians overhearing.

“We think he’s--” he started, and then swallowed, finding his throat abruptly dry.

Morgan, still watching him carefully, gracefully stepped in. “We think he’s starving them.”

Rossi’s brow furrowed. He and Prentiss had been at the dump site, and he’d already shared the details of how the unsub had meticulously and almost kindly laid the body out. “That… doesn’t fit. This is a guy who took on a lot of risk just to make sure the boy looked pristine for his return visits. Listen to what he just said--’he doesn’t _want_ to talk to you.’ He cares about the kids. So why starve him?”

Reid rallied. “The ME did say he’d be extremely weak. Maybe that’s the point? Control?”

“Who needs help controlling a five-year-old,” Morgan said, disgusted.

“Or maybe this is the sexual element to these abductions that’s been missing so far,” Prentiss said. “Maybe starvation is what gets him off.”

They put that depressing thought aside and prepared to head to the hotel. Unlike normal child abductions, they had a defined seven-day window to solve this case; offenders with such specific timeframes didn’t usually deviate from their patterns until forced to. There was time to sleep. “Gideon,” Morgan said, “I think you and Reid should take the night shift this time.”

Gideon gave them both one of his trademark assessing looks and nodded. Reid knew why Morgan had suggested Gideon stay behind--Morgan was many things, but when it came to the maneuvering he did in his personal life, he was far from subtle. He was giving him a chance to come clean with Gideon about the dreams, the fear, the sympathetic horror which gripped him at inopportune moments. Of course that would be Morgan’s answer; Reid shouldn’t have gone to him in the first place. Nobody ever thought Morgan was too young or too fragile or too possibly crazy. Morgan may have understood what it was like to always feel like you could never stop fighting for what was yours, Reid thought, but in some ways he didn’t understand him at all.  
  
  
  
“Reid. _Reid._ Wake up.”

Reid had conditioned himself to respond to that voice immediately, instinctively, so his eyes flew open even before he could realize that he was dreaming. Gideon hovered over him, his face grave. A moment later, Reid understood why. Thumps upstairs as the Bridges roused. He closed his eyes in misery.

“Is everything okay?” Craig Bridges called out. He was thundering down the stairs. Amy followed in his wake like a pale shadow. “Is it--is it Michael?” The furious look on his face implied he already knew.

“No, no, no, Mr. Bridges. It was just a dream. Please go back to sleep,” Gideon said in his most soothing tones. “Please, just go back to bed and try to get some rest.”

“A dream--do you have _any idea_ what time it is?!” Craig demanded. “What the hell are you doing? What the hell kind of outfit are you running here?! Our _son_ is missing and you wake us up in the middle of the night--”

“Sorry,” Reid said miserably. “Sorry.” Just what they needed, an investigator losing it in their living room--he knew what Gideon would say, that he’d jeopardized their credibility, that he was a liability--he’d already used up all of the goodwill he’d built up on Owen Savage, maybe this time they wouldn’t just warn him, they’d fire him--and then he’d be back at home with Jack dreaming of dead little boys--he scrubbed at his eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t meant to. It was just a dream.”

Craig opened his mouth, winding up for another round. Gideon cut him off kindly, but firmly. “Sir, we very deeply apologize for startling you at a time like this. It was unintentional, I assure you. Believe it or not, we’re all human. These things happen. I implore you to try and get some rest for tomorrow.”

Craig huffed and stormed back upstairs. Amy lingered, a shadow floating untethered. She looked right at Reid. “Are you all right?” she asked.

God, she was just like-- “Yeah,” Reid said softly. “I’m so sorry. I was dreaming.”

“About Michael?” she ventured.

“No,” he said, unsure if that made it better or worse, if she resented that his thoughts were being pulled in another direction when her whole world hinged on his ability to perform his job or if she was relieved that the people meant to save her son weren’t so hopeless they, too, were dreaming of his death.

“All of mine are,” she confessed. “I can’t close my eyes. I’m scared of what I might see.”

Reid looked up at her helplessly. “Mrs. Bridges,” Gideon said in a voice of infinite gentleness, “Michael is not dead. And I swear, we will do our utmost to make sure he is returned to you safe and sound. If you’re going to help us do that, you need to be well-rested. I know it’s difficult, I know it feels impossible. But please try.”

She nodded and faded back upstairs. Reid shoved his palms into his eyes and braced himself for what came next.

The couch depressed under Gideon’s weight. He didn’t look up. Like Amy, he was afraid of what he might see. “Reid, look at me,” Gideon said in the same gentle but firm tone he’d used with Craig, the one you never considered disobeying even for a moment. Reluctantly, Reid raised his eyes to Gideon’s. “Want to talk about it?”

“Do I have a choice?” Reid laughed self-consciously.

“Sure you do. But I think you should. Morgan told me you’ve been having nightmares.” _Snitch,_ Reid thought with an unusual amount of viciousness. “No, don’t make that face. He’s only looking out for you. You think I haven’t had this talk with him? With Prentiss?”

A jolt. Somehow, he’d never considered that. He asked Morgan if he ever had nightmares, but he always envisioned him dealing with them in stoic, macho silence. Like, he’d thought, he was supposed to. Gideon said, “We all get nightmares, every one of us, even JJ and Garcia. Who wouldn’t? Every day we wake up, go to work, and see the worst--the very worst--of what human beings can do to each other. Of course we dream of monsters. Some nights are bad ones. They just are.”

“So how do you--” Reid’s voice cracked, horrifyingly. He swallowed, restarted, “So how do you… cope, I guess?”

Gideon reached into his pocket and pulled out--his wallet. Plain leather, Reid noticed even in a haze, functional, frugal, typical Gideon. He unfolded it and showed Reid the picture in the center. “Her name,” he said, “is Deborah Louise Addison. She's with her husband, Tim. Kids, Amber and Keith. Eleven and nine. In 1985, she was abducted. Thirteen years old. We were on the case. And we found her before she was harmed. Every year, she writes me a letter. Includes a photo. I swap ‘em out.”

Reid swallowed. “It’s nice, but--”

“Jill Morris,” Gideon interrupted. “Adrian Burroughs. Lindsey Vaughn. Owen Savage. Stacy Sheppards. Mark Kurlansky. Twenty-two members of the Separatarian sect. Nathan Harris. These are people who are alive because of _you_ and you alone _._ Who would not be alive if you were not on this team. Those are the ones you think about before you go to sleep.” He looked back at his wallet, ran a finger over the stitched seams. “Every night I look at Deborah. I think of her, living her life. A life we gave back to her. It doesn’t always keep the monsters away. But it helps.”

Once, curled up in bed together, Spencer had asked if sleeping next to someone had any effect on Aaron’s seemingly endless, all-consuming nightmares. Aaron had stuck his nose in the join between Spencer’s neck and shoulder and mumbled into his collarbone, _“It helps._ You _help._ ” Suddenly, Reid ached to be able to tell Aaron about the thing haunting him, the foreboding about Michael Bridges’s fate he couldn’t shake, to see if it worked the other way. But their nightly phone call was on hold while Reid slept in the Bridges’ living room instead of a nice, relatively private hotel. And he was sitting on their soft, overstuffed couch--a family couch--with his mentor and his guilt and no one else at all.

“I’m just,” he said, “scared that this boy won’t be one of them. The people we save.”

“We can’t control that, Reid,” Gideon said sadly. “All we can do is fight for him.” He patted him on the shoulder.

“Thanks,” Reid said quietly, because it had helped, in spite of the longing so acute it choked him.

“Think you can try to get some rest?”

Reid nodded, but after Gideon snapped the light off, he pulled the covers up to his chin and lay awake, watching the clock’s red numbers turn over. He wouldn’t disturb the Bridges again tonight.  
  
  
  
He was up before Gideon was, and before the rest of the team arrived. With the Bridges’ coffeemaker he made himself a pot of coffee that was approximately two parts caffeine, two parts sugar, and one part actual coffee. The day dawned with the clear cold grace of a funeral. Fitting, considering where their next stop was.

Reid watched with one disinterested eye as Gideon and Rossi gently coaxed Amy into agreeing again to attend the funeral of the first victim. The other was aimed at Morgan. He expected anger, but speaking with Gideon had dampened his short fuse somewhat. Now he felt… betrayed, yes, but in a distant, academic way. Morgan hadn’t exactly been wrong; talking to Gideon had made him feel better, if only because Gideon’s smooth, well-practiced speech spoke to how common a problem this was among the BAU. He found himself wandering into Michael’s room, trying to see what Gideon saw when he ran his hands over a mantelpiece, a bookshelf, a cabinet, and came away with just the clue needed to unravel the case. That was where Morgan found him.

“Hey, kid,” Morgan said gently from the door. “Almost time to go.”

Reid didn’t say anything. He just assessed the dinosaur toys and framed drawings and basketball net on the back of the door and tried desperately not to think of crisp blue sheets and spaceship toys in his own home. “Come on, Reid,” Morgan’s voice took on a cajoling quality. “You still pissed that I told Gideon about your dreams?”

Reid snorted. “Well, I’m not going to tell you anything else in confidence for a while.”

Morgan chuckled, taking the jab the way it was meant. He stepped more fully into the room. “So what’s eating you, then?”

Reid stopped where he was turning slowly on the spot, taking in the detritus of a missing child’s life. “Gideon said he’d had to have that talk with you, too.” Morgan nodded slowly. “So what do you have nightmares about? Come on,” he added, as he saw Morgan open his mouth to deny him, “you already humiliated me in front of my boss. Give me this.”

“You’re a manipulative little brat, you know that?” Morgan tapped his fingers on the doorframe. “Sometimes it’s whatever case we’re working on. A little before your time, there was this one case, and the vic lived in this building with a creepy old elevator--anyway.” Reid smiled at the thought of Morgan having nightmares about a creaky elevator. “Sometimes, it’s--”

He paused. “It was six months after I got into the BAU. Flyspeck of a town called Sixteen, Montana. There was this guy going around strangling women, four victims by the time we got the call. And me, I was young. And arrogant. So I told the locals, I can get you your guy. As soon as I get what I need _._ ”

“More victims,” Reid said softly. It was the most wrenching part of the job, hitting a wall and waiting for more bodies and knowing that the best you could hope for was saving the one after this one. There were rumors about Gideon, of course, and from what Reid could tell they’d been circulating in more or less the same vein since 2004: Gideon was cracking in his old age, Rossi was the real backbone of the BAU, his retirement was imminent any day now. The closest Reid ever saw Gideon get to the version of Gideon that had been built up by rumors among the FBI cadets and lower-level agents was during the unsteady in-between times, when they listlessly tried to convince themselves they would solve the case before anyone else had to die. 

“Yeah,” Morgan said. “More victims. Gideon gave me the evil eye. I didn’t get it then.” He shook his head. “The very next day, Reid. She was just seventeen. And her eyes--they were so--and I had to look the locals in the eye, these people who knew her, and pretend like I hadn’t asked for this.”

“Morgan,” Reid said softly. His heart, for so long turned inward to his own problems, pulsed with sympathy. He thought of Gideon last night saying, _Of course we dream of monsters._

“I’d seen dead bodies before. But there was something about this one. Like I’d--called her death into being with my carelessness. I started seeing her whenever I closed my eyes. I started seeing her everywhere.”

“So what happened?” Reid asked, subdued.

“Gideon talked me through it,” Morgan said simply. Reid understood. He shuffled uncomfortably in this room stuffed with things that belonged to a boy who hovered in a terrible limbo, not quite dead, not quite alive.

“I’ve been having this dream for as long as I can remember,” he said dully. “There’s--a boy. In the basement. And when I find him, he’s dead. He’s been--abused. Lately I hadn’t had it so often but now it’s back. And for the first time, I can see the boy’s face, and he’s--” He buried his face in his hands.

Morgan said with horror, “This is your first time with kids, isn’t it.”

Reid nodded through the closed cradle of his fingers. There’d been teenagers before, the kids at the Separatarian Sect’s compound, but he knew what Morgan meant. This was his first stereotypical child abduction. When every moment they spent asleep or getting coffee or failing to think up something brilliant was a moment that somewhere a child was experiencing something too horrible for words.

“I never wanted to know what my son looked like stabbed nine times in the chest,” Reid said thickly.

In two long strides Morgan had crossed the room and wrapped his arms around Reid. Reid sank into the hug gratefully, the faint spice of Morgan’s cologne comforting, though not quite the right scent, the strength of his grip familiar but not quite the embrace he longed for. “Kid,” Morgan said, and then had to stop to blow a flyaway strand of Reid’s hair out of his face. “You know that no one would think less of you if you sat this one out.”

Reid laughed bitterly. “And what, just stay behind at the office every time a kid disappears? We’re the first port of call for all high-priority child abductions in the Mid-Atlantic region, Morgan. I couldn’t--I couldn’t bear it. Being useless.”

Morgan let him go, looked at him sharply, assessingly. “Okay. Then let’s go find this boy.”

“Yeah,” Reid heard himself say, but in his mind he was still thinking about basements and Jungian dream analysis and how hollowly defiant Morgan’s words had sounded bouncing off the walls of Michael Bridges’s empty room.  
  
  
  
The cemetery. Hot. Sunny. Reid always wondered what the mourners preferred, a gray, weepy day or something beautiful to stand as a monument. The scaled-down casket. The scent of white lilies on the air.

He squinted at the child-sized coffin, trying to think, trying to _remember_ \--

A boy, not Jack this time, but dark-haired, curls neat, arranged like he was sleeping in the silk walls of a tomb. A cemetery. Hot. Sunny. His mother--

His mother?

“Reid,” Morgan said under his breath. He’d been following him doggedly since the scene he’d made in Michael’s room, half bodyguard, half auditor. “You okay?”

“I’ve been here before,” he murmured, more to himself than to Morgan, before he caught hold of himself and returned to scanning the crowd for anyone particularly perverted-looking.  
  
  
  
Watching Prentiss and Rossi put the screws to the man they’d noticed taping the funeral, Reid fought to keep his attention on the case, and not on visions brought on by deprivation-fueled microsleeps. Not on new and horrible twists of that old nightmare, the one he’d started to have after Aaron had confessed the truth of Haley’s death to him, that awful night in reverse: Haley breathing but Aaron and Jack dead. Not on his seemingly inexorable subconscious impulse to conflate the possibility of finding Michael Bridges’s starved, silent body with the image of his own son, smiling and curious and alive.

There was something off about this guy. Not just that he’d been videotaping a child’s funeral. His stiffness, but also his lack of concern that they’d charge him with murdering a child and abducting another. None of it fit with the kind of character who would call the parents to taunt them over their loss.

“Oh, do you like videotaping things other than funerals?” Prentiss said, faux-friendly.

The door shuddered open and closed behind where Reid and Detective Ashby were watching Prentiss and Rossi’s progress. Morgan stepped up to join them; he’d disappeared once they got to the station. He was carrying a case file, too slim to be one of theirs. “What’s that?” Reid asked, curious.

Morgan surveyed him. “Give us a minute, will you?” he asked the detective, who nodded and scuttled off, obviously cowed by whatever secret FBI thing was about to go on. “I got one of the detectives to pull it. You ever know a Riley Jenkins?”

Reid frowned, scanned his memory banks. There’d been Riley Whittaker in high school, Riley Everson in his organic chemistry class… “No, I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “Who is he?”

“You sure? Think back. You would’ve been really little.”

There was--wow, he hadn’t thought about that in years--”I had an imaginary friend named Riley when I was little,” he offered.

Morgan handed him the case file. Reid flipped it open and absorbed the pertinent details: 1986, child sexual assault and homicide, unsolved. “He was found in the basement of his own home. 1986, you would’ve been four, right?”

He would have--and he almost seemed to remember the facts of the case before he saw them on the page, facts coming faster and faster but detached from any memory, like he’d picked up the knowledge by osmosis. Four. Even eidetic memories took a while to form. He mostly remembered moving--playing at being a magician--a funeral--

His throat was dry. He licked his lips. Tried to sound reasonable, “Maybe it’s a coincidence,” he said, though his doubt was draining out of him even as he said it.

“’Nine times in the chest,’ is what you said to me,” Morgan said. “That was highly specific, Reid. It’s how I found the case, actually. That’s not your imagination. That’s the real world leaking into your dreams.”

That--had nothing to do with Riley Jenkins, Reid wanted to say. But Morgan didn’t know Aaron existed except as a shadowy figure kissing him good-bye on a darkened street, much less the gory details of George Foyet’s vicious attack on the undercover agent who had exposed him as the infamous Boston Reaper.

Then again, maybe it did. Maybe the boy he’d been dreaming about for decades had had Riley’s face before he’d had Jack’s.

On the other side of the glass, the quality of Prentiss’s voice changed from incredulous to gloating, startling him. “Oh, wait, that’s it. Death _gets you off_.”

Right. Interrogation. The missing boy over which whose face he kept superimposing Jack’s, for all that Jack was years younger. There was a reason that they didn’t _chat_ during child abduction cases, and it was this. Any distraction, any diversion was unforgivable.

Reid cleared his throat. “Maybe--maybe we shouldn’t be doing this here.”

Morgan looked him over, then nodded. In the interrogation room, Prentiss was shouting, “I think you want to tell us _exactly_ how sick you are, Walter, don’t you? You _want_ us to search your home, and your computer, because this is eating you up inside and you know you need to be stopped--”

“I _never_ would’ve molested that boy!” the man they’d caught perving over a dead child insisted. Reid sighed and called Gideon to tell him that their best suspect had gotten the details of the case wrong.

They converged back on the Bridges house, dejected and tired. Morgan let him keep the file, though.  
  
  
  
Another call. Rossi frowned and played the recording over again. _“Put the FBI on,”_ the harsh, computer-generated tones of the unsub sounded.

“This is the first time he’s mentioned any kind of authority,” he mused. “This could be a good sign, that he’s open to letting a third party mediate his conflict with the parents.”

“He was at the funeral. I told you,” Amy Bridges said dully from where she and Craig were still hovering at the edges of the room.

“He was at the funeral and you arrested the wrong man!” Craig snarled.

The wrong man. Reid frowned. “Garcia, could you fast-forward--that part about the clothes--yeah, right there--”

“-- _those silly blue sneakers and lime green oxford--”_

Reid tapped his pen against his lips. “Again?”

_“--silly blue sneakers and lime green oxford--”_

“What do you see, Reid?” Gideon prodded.

“Guys,” he said, “I think it’s a woman.”

According to Broadbridge, 2004, women used more details in their speech than men did. Add that to the level of specificity with which she described her victim’s fashion--the lack of competitive drive, gloating that she’d bested the FBI--focusing on the _mother_ as the point of comparison, not the father--

“She talked about what the child _wanted_ ,” Morgan added. “What he liked to wear. How he slept. She emphasized the caretaking.” 

“We could have looked for both,” Amy said, frustrated.

Rossi shook his head. “The statistics are overwhelming: women abduct newborns, men abduct children.” 

“So,” Gideon said, “how does the unsub’s gender change the profile?”

For the first time in days, Reid felt alert, like a fully functioning limb of the team. He rattled off, “Women aren’t need-driven; they aren’t sexually motivated, so it’s much less likely that she’s assaulting her victims in a nontraditional manner, like we suspected--”

Abruptly, Amy turned on her heel and walked out of the room. Reid colored. In an instant, he felt clunky and unwieldy again, like a puzzle piece that wouldn’t quite fit, slightly off-kilter from the rest of the team. Craig vacillated off to the side, expression torn between fury and fear and relief.

“Mr. Bridges,” Gideon said kindly, “would you mind giving us some privacy?”

Obviously relieved to be dismissed, Craig nodded and fairly bolted out of the room. Reid closed his eyes, face still burning, consumed again with terrible sympathy for the parents and the sinking suspicion that he--not the team, him specifically--was making everything worse. God, to hear someone casually mention the sexual abuse of his own son--

“Go on, Reid,” Prentiss said encouragingly, but he shook his head; all of his facts had fled his brain and flown the coop with Amy. 

Morgan, bless him, jumped in and took the awful sensation of the team’s stares off of him. “Given the way she seems to be focused on taking better care of the boys than their own mothers, this may be a form of maternal desire.”

“So we’re looking for women who’ve either suffered the loss of a child recently or found out that they can’t have children,” Prentiss said.

“Sorry, amigos,” Garcia said. “All the infertile women in the city of Las Vegas? That’s way too broad, I need more.”

“Some parts of the profile are right,” Rossi said. “Middle-class, owns a car with four-wheel drive… Garcia, any of the four-wheel drive vehicles that attended the funeral registered to women?”

Clacking. “Nada. Sorry.”

“Time,” Gideon said. “Time is very important to her. Seven days, three minutes…”

“One neat aspect,” Rossi suggested.

“So we’re looking for a woman recently released from prison or a mental institution, having suffered the traumatic loss of a child or a similar event,” Reid said, his color having faded some in the wake of a team brainstorming session like any other. “Garcia, does that help?”

“No, I’m sorry. I can check jails and prisons for women released to the Las Vegas area two weeks ago, but each institution will have its own private server and database… I can hack each one individually, but I don’t think we have that kind of time.”

“You’re right, we don’t,” Gideon said grimly. “It’s not likely, given the way she’s so rigid about schedules, but now that she knows we’re closing in she may accelerate and kill Michael just to dispose of the evidence.”

Reid closed his eyes. “I think… I think I know a way.”  
  
  
  
“So how do you know the director of a sanitarium?” Prentiss had asked laughingly as she ferried him across the city. He hadn’t responded. She would find out soon enough.

Bennington Sanitarium never changed. His library branch had gotten new modern lighting and even uglier, more uncomfortable chairs than they’d had before, his schools had undergone renovation in the years since he’d graduated, but walking into Bennington was like being eighteen again, wretched and lonely and wondering if his mother would ever forgive him. Each time he returned here there was that split second of wondering whether she’d turn him away like she had the first year and a half she’d spent here, furious and grateful and furious that she was grateful, swinging in and out of lucidity as the doctors experimented with her meds. 

He hesitated at the door. Prentiss was at his right elbow. He hadn’t wanted to let them know--if he’d had it his way, no one would ever--people looked at him differently when they knew. Like his genius was somehow more likely to topple into madness now that they knew his mother was crazy, like he was fragile, like his sanity needed shielding.

Only one person had ever looked at him the exact same way after finding out as he had before.

This wasn’t about him. This wasn’t about his mother. This was for a little blond boy who liked dinosaur toys and eating candy in bed.

Dr. Norman spotted him hovering at the door and like that, the blissful time he’d enjoyed when his colleagues believed his family relationships were boring and normal instead of literally schizophrenic was up. “Dr. Reid!” he said jovially. “I didn’t realize you were in town.”

“I’m here on a case, actually.” Hearing Prentiss shift behind him, he said, “Dr. Norman, this is SSA Emily Prentiss, my--” _friend--_ “colleague.”

“Pleasure,” Prentiss said, wearing that charming diplomat’s daughter smile.

“Actually,” Reid said, “I was hoping you’d be able to help us out.”

“What can I do?” Dr. Norman asked, puzzled.

“You’ve heard about the recent child murder and second abduction?” He nodded, the same distantly sad look that Reid had come to recognize on people who weren’t directly affected by violence on his face. “The person responsible is a woman who may have been recently released from an institution. I know it’s a long shot that she may have been institutionalized here, but could you check your patient files? And--if you could give the profile to the administrators of other hospitals, that would hugely help our search.”

“Of course,” Dr. Norman said, accepting the profile. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He left them lingering on the edges of the dayroom. Reid was careful not to let his eyes drift to where his mother was sitting by her usual window. Prentiss looked at him curiously, and he knew he’d run out of vague platitudes.

“My mother’s over there,” he said softly, and watched Prentiss’s eyes go from confusion to understanding to sympathy.

“Reid,” she said, and touched his arm lightly. “How long?”

“Nine years,” he said, and watched her do the math.

“You should go talk to her,” she said, surprising him. “I mean, given our schedules, I bet you don’t get a lot of time to visit her.” Which was true, but--he looked into Prentiss’s warm, kind eyes and with a terrible crash of relief saw not pity or judgment but simple understanding.

“Thanks,” he said quietly, and meant it.  
  
  
  
Diana Reid’s eyes grew round when she set eyes on her son. “Spencer! What are you doing here? Where’s my grandson?” She looked behind him, as if he might produce a toddler from midair.

“He’s still in DC with Jessica,” Spencer said. “I’m here for work. I’m actually here with a friend of mine--” but Prentiss had gone to hover around the reception desk, conspicuously giving him some privacy.

“You’re so thin,” she clucked at him, which was rich, because he definitely got that from her. “And--” she reached out and tilted his chin up, examining him from a better angle-- “you look tired. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Almost against his will, he was smiling.

“You haven’t been sleeping.”

“How do you know that?” he sputtered.

“I’m your mother, Spencer. We're maternal animals. We just _know._ It’s instinct. We just know things.”

He smiled wryly at her. “I’ve been having nightmares,” he admitted.

Her worry sharpened her usually soft, mildly unfocused gaze. “Oh, Spencer, you know I worry about you.”

“I know,” he whispered. He hesitated. But she was the only one who could give him answers, the only one who _knew_ , and her memory was as unreliable as his own, though for a different reason. The fragility of the mind. “Mom… did I ever know a boy called Riley Jenkins?”

Her brow furrowed. Her gaze turned inward, like it often had when he’d been a child, but with a purpose. A light in the fog of memory. He ached; in his childhood, when she hadn’t been having one of her episodes, she’d been razor-sharp, keenly observant, never missed a beat or a stanza. Of course, she’d been having what amounted to a full-time episode for years. “Riley Jenkins…” she said slowly, then, in the same sort of haze, “Oh, he was a story you made up.”

Well, that explained how he’d somehow gotten the notion that Riley Jenkins was his imaginary friend. He leaned forward, like his intentness could draw out the sharpness he knew still lurked underneath the places where her mind had gone soft and fuzzy. “No. No, Mom, he was real. There’s--there’s a police file with the Las Vegas PD, there are newspaper articles about it. When I was four, a little boy named Riley Jenkins was murdered.”

“No.” She was shaking her head now. “No, I think you’re mistaken. Riley was--a dream you had--”

“Mother, that’s impossible--”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Reid,” Dr. Nelson interrupted them. Reid started; he hadn’t noticed him come up behind them. In a flash, he stopped being Spencer and started being SSA Reid again. “I spoke with the directors of nine other hospitals in the area. No one has recently released a patient fitting your description.”

Reid bit his lip. Maybe Garcia would have better luck with the jails, but that was as good as the team was probably going to get with the institutions. He thanked him anyway. Dr. Nelson peered closely at him. He’d always been distantly paternal to Reid like he could tell how much he wanted it, always with a warm word when his mother was at her worst and he needed it most, not in the intrusive way of a profiler but the passive way of a psychologist. He said thoughtfully, “You know, if this woman has an Axis-I condition, her release wouldn’t be as important as whether or not she was keeping to her medications.”

Right, right, that--made sense. Offenders who suffered from personality disorders acted as soon as they were physically able, but mental illnesses which didn’t fall under the personality disorder category might be totally masked and asymptomatic so long as the subject was receiving treatment… But why would she go off her medication if she was delusional? Possibly something triggered her--they’d already profiled that the stressor might be the loss of her child, so something related to that? Depression, grief? A medical reason--?

“I went off my medication when I was pregnant with you,” Diana was saying. “I spent every day white-knuckled with terror, but I made it. And it was beautiful.”

\--like pregnancy.

The image of JJ wincing and adjusting herself discreetly to compensating for the swelling. Aaron, explaining the difference between breast milk and formula to him, and then, much later, bent over Spencer’s profiling textbook, explaining that the most common delusional psychoses which led to violence included the projection of a loved one onto a surrogate--and how as the delusion progressed the surrogate needed to have less and less in common with the original. The boys. Their empty stomachs but nutrient-rich blood. She was breast-feeding them.

She was replacing a newborn.

“Oh God,” he said numbly, and stumbled to his feet. His mother, worried, reached for him; over by the front desk, Prentiss looked over quizzically. “Sorry Mom, gotta go, I’ll see you when the case is over,” he managed to mumble only because Diana Reid had drilled into him that his mind was never moving too fast for basic manners.

He was already dialing Gideon by the time he caught up with Prentiss. “What’d you find out?” Gideon answered brusquely. He, too, was not big on formalities when there was information to be had.

“I think I’ve identified a specific medical condition we can use to track her,” he said.  
  
  
  
Huddled in the atrium of the Bennington Sanitarium, Reid listened as between them, Rossi and Prentiss got Garcia to cross-reference the birth records from the last month with license plates from the funeral. 

Her name was Claire Bates, and two weeks ago social services had taken her baby from her.

Prentiss drove fast, but not quite Morgan-fast; the other half of the team would get there first.

“You want to tell me what been bothering you?” she asked as they just barely careened past a light turning from yellow to red.

“Shouldn’t you be focusing on the road?” Reid sniped.

“I’m a profiler, I can multitask,” she grinned. She looked him over speculatively. “At the hospital I thought it might be your mother, but you’ve seen her and you’re still tense. Is it the case?”

“No,” he said. That Claire Bates was projecting her own newborn onto the boys was practically the only thing about the last couple of days which made sense at all. “And stop profiling me,” he grumbled.

“Nope. I’m nosy,” she said cheerfully.

Reid sighed gustily and gave up. Morgan already knew, Rossi probably knew if Morgan had told him as well, Gideon had gotten an up-close-and-personal view of it, he might as well tell Prentiss. “I’ve been having nightmares.”

“Ohh,” she said sympathetically, and didn’t say anything else.

He knew what she was doing--uncomfortable silence encouraged the other party to speak first--but maybe he was dying to tell her anyway, because he burst out, “It’s just--hard. I keep thinking about Jack. And Morgan has this theory--” Too late, he clammed up.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t put too much stock in Morgan’s theories,” Prentiss said. “When I first started getting nightmares, he tried to Freud me. In my dreams, there’s this girl, and she’s missing. And I look, and I look, and I can never find her. Nothing bad really happens, but I just _know_ all the terrible things that could be happening. And I wake up still thinking about them.” Her voice was calm, steady, but he could see the effort it took to keep it that way. She smiled at him. “He told me I was lonely and I should get a dog.”

In spite of himself, Reid cracked a smile. “You don’t strike me as a dog person.”

“Oh, no way. Morgan’s just one of those annoying dog owners who tries to push their love of dogs onto everyone.”

“Dogs don’t really like me,” Reid said contemplatively. “Most animals don’t. It used to be the same with kids, but then Jack. I think I’m doing better.”

Prentiss grew serious. “You’re a great dad, Spencer. I know you protect Jack. And I can’t imagine any kid growing up safer or happier.”

Reid swallowed around the hot lump in his throat. He was _not_ going to cry in front his coworkers, damn it, he’d made it to the BAU at last and he was not going to ruin it now by branding himself as the crybaby profiler for life. “Thanks,” he croaked out.

“Anytime. We’re here.” She swerved into the long dirt driveway. Sure enough, the other SUV was already parked outside. She tossed him a vest. “Take the side door.”

Through his earwig, Reid could hear some kind of a stand-off; Rossi and Gideon trying to coax Claire into--something. He put it aside and cleared the kitchen. At the end of a hallway was a closed door. Behind him, he could hear Prentiss moving through the house. He braced himself and stepped in, gun up, alert.

Michael Bridges was standing in the center of the room. Without thinking, Reid opened his arms, just like he would do with Jack, and Michael tumbled into them, the familiar tangle of limbs and hair that was a child. 

“I’ve got Michael,” he gasped into his mic, and thought that his relief might shake the whole house down. Commotion down the line. He heard Prentiss jog up behind him, swearing with relief. It didn’t matter.

“I got you,” he whispered, the same way he did when Jack skinned a knee or stubbed a toe. “It’s all right. I’ve got you.”

He lifted him up and carried him out of the house, into the bright day.  
  
  
  
Amy Bridges didn’t cry when she had her son in her arms again. But it was close.

Spencer watched her wrap herself around her son and felt, inexplicably, irrationally, at peace.  
  
  
  
Gideon was watching the reunion from his perch under the eaves of the house. He wasn’t smiling but his eyes, usually so heavy with meaning and knowledge, were light. He tilted his head in Reid’s direction when he joined him.

“It won’t make them go away,” he said. “But it will help.”

Reid watched the Bridges rejoice and committed it to memory for darker times, a balm against a rainy day. “One more to add to the list?” he asked.

“Someday, I’ll show you the real list.”

Reid teetered on the edge of bravery. He knew that sooner or later, the whole team would know about his mother--for one thing, he’d have to put it in his After-Action Report--but he wasn’t sure if Gideon did, or how to broach the topic if he didn’t. “Do you think…” he started hesitantly, “Could we maybe stay the night in Las Vegas?”

Gideon subjected him to his penetrating gaze. Reid stood still, like he was being X-rayed at the airport; it was a similar feeling. “If the team doesn’t object.”

“Object to what?” Morgan interjected as he ambled over from where he’d loaded Claire Bates into the back of a police car.

Gideon eyed him unsmilingly. “Think you can find something to do in Vegas for the evening?”

Morgan broke out into a huge, boyish grin. When he wanted to, Reid considered, he could really be quite charming.  
  
  
  
That night, he fell asleep in his mother’s room with the Riley Jenkins case file on his pillow.  
  
  
  
A basement--

He picks his way down the stairs carefully, the only light coming through the slats of the stairway. His heart is pounding. The team is both right behind him in the hall and have left him totally alone. It’s not like it is during a takedown, when he’s focused and alert to every possibility, every permutation of how this day could go. He already knows how this story will end.

This, though has never happened before:

There’s a man. Neat haircut, pressed clothes. Fastidious. Would rape and murder with the same meticulousness. Hair just shading to gray. Focused on his task. Spencer takes quiet steps so as not to alert him. He’s laying down a body. Small. Arranging the legs to rest neatly. Like a flour sack. 

Spencer’s hands are still on the gun. It’s too late for the boy, but not for him.

He steps onto bare concrete. Keeps his aim steady. He’s never shot anyone, but he knows how to. Front sight, trigger press, follow through. And he _wants_.

“FBI, don’t move,” he says, clear, authoritative, like Morgan does.

The man freezes. 

“Show me your hands,” Spencer says, steady, not letting his eyes stray to the corpse’s shoes, blue light-up sneakers that he last remembers lacing for his son before they went their separate ways, Jack to the park with the nanny, Spencer to the airfield on his way to join the search for a missing five-year-old boy. Slowly, slowly, the man raises his hands.

“Turn around.”

Front sight, trigger press, follow through.

The man turns slowly on the spot. He has a narrow, inquisitive face. A familiar face.

“Dad?” he asks, and the dream shatters.  
  
  
  
He found them at their hotel which, of course, because it was Las Vegas, had a little bank of slot machines near the entrance around which the team had congregated.

They all bore the scars and marks of a night left to their own devices, the slightly nauseated expressions and bleary eyes a Las Vegas local could spot from twenty feet away. JJ was pregnant, but Morgan was the one who looked like he was glowing. Obviously, Las Vegas had been good to him.

Prentiss, meanwhile, looked like she was about to throw up at any moment. Well, everyone took to Vegas differently.

“We were about to leave without you,” JJ said cheerfully. “You all packed up?”

Reid swallowed and did his best to look like a normal person who did things like take vacation days and visit his mother. “Actually,” he said, meeting Gideon’s eye, “I was thinking of taking a few days off and staying here a little longer. It’s… been a really long time since I’ve seen my mom.”

Which was true. The last time he’d seen her had been his wedding, which had been--wow, over a year ago. They hadn’t celebrated their anniversary; Aaron had been on assignment. And right after the wedding, he’d joined the FBI Academy. So, true. Just not the whole truth.

Gideon didn’t smile. “You sure that’s a good idea?” he asked, and Reid knew he wasn’t talking about taking the time off.

“Yes,” he said, trying to project confidence and determination. He had to know. More than he needed this job, more than he _loved_ this job, more than he cared whether Gideon would consider this gross unprofessionalism and fire him the moment he got back, he had to know.

Gideon seemed to see that. He nodded slowly--Reid had a split-second moment of terror anyway as images of him being fired on the spot flooded his mind--and hauled himself to his feet. “Let’s go, then,” he said. “See me when you get back,” he added, and without giving Reid another look headed for the revolving doors.

Great. Just what he needed to focus the mind, a simmering dread to carry with him through the next couple of days. Morgan bumped shoulders with him companionably; Prentiss didn’t even seem to notice any tension, just dragged herself off of her armchair and slumped to follow. It was JJ who paused. Her small hand fluttered before landing on Reid’s arm.

“Hey,” she said, “I’ll see you when you get back.”

“You too,” Reid said softly, and then she was gone, too. He watched them leave.

Strangely, he already missed them.

Then he made a beeline for the Fountainview’s criminally overpriced car rental service.  
  
  
  
Even if Gideon was so going to fire him, he was still FBI for now, and that came with its perks.

At the North Las Vegas Police Station, the duty sergeant had snapped to attention the moment Reid had pulled his badge out. He’d gotten lucky, he’d discovered; the detective originally assigned to the case was not only still with the LVMPD, but actually worked out of the same station. Prentiss had complained once about how often the original officers assigned to thirty-year-old cases connected to their current investigations turned up retired or dead, making it impossible to reinterview them. Reid had never actually worked a case that old himself, until now anyway, but he took her word for it.

Benjamin Hyde had been the kind of detective who seemed to think that gruffness was the only qualifying characteristic for a police officer. Reid had seen the skeptical look he gave him, lingering on his--all right, _slightly_ longer than regulation--hair and where his gun was strapped into an appendix carry. He’d seen enough sheriffs and police chiefs look him over and immediately discount him as a nebbish pencil-pusher--and before that, he’d seen that look on the faces of his classmates and peers often enough--to know what he’d thought of him. Well. It hadn’t mattered if Hyde had liked him. He’d still answered his questions.

Clipped to the first page of the file had been a old, badly preserved photo of Riley Jenkins grinning at the camera in a red T-ball uniform. The Rovers. That same t-shirt was moldering somewhere in Uncle Gordon’s attic with the rest of the detritus from his childhood that he’d packed up when he’d moved his mother into Bennington. His father had coached that T-ball team.

Hyde had always thought it was somebody outside the house.

Reid was still flipping through the case file he’d appropriated somewhat inexpertly from the Las Vegas PD when he got to his hotel room and realized that something was very badly wrong. He stopped cold at the door, which was cracked. The faint rustle of the TV slipped into the hall. There was someone inside.

He thought about drawing his gun, but--that was definitely paranoid, wasn’t it? He was here on vacation, technically, not a BAU case. Who would want to break into his hotel room and--

\--watch _Days of Our Lives?_

He pushed the door open. Morgan’s damn boots were on the ottoman.

“What,” he said, “are you doing.”

“Shh,” Rossi said, “Jill’s just about to tell Phillip she’s pregnant.”

“Why are you watching _Days of Our Lives_ in my hotel room,” he tried.

“Why aren’t _you_ with your mom,” Morgan countered, just as Rossi corrected absently, “ _Young and the Restless.”_

Guiltily, Reid set the box containing the Riley Jenkins files down. “I was going to go see her a little later--you know, she has group in the mornings and I thought maybe--”

“Reid,” Morgan said.

He was such a bad liar, _why_ was he such a bad liar, why had Gideon ever taken a chance on him, if his life ever depended on having to bluff an unsub into submission he was screwed. “Fine,” he huffed. “I’m working on an old case. So have you come to drag me back home kicking and screaming?”

“Obviously not, man,” Morgan said. “We’re here to help.”

What. This was somehow more surreal than walking into what should’ve been an empty hotel room and encountering Morgan and Rossi avidly engrossed in the vagaries of daytime television. “What,” he said.

“Me, Rossi, and you’ve got the girls on speed dial, and the only reason they’re not here with us right now is because JJ’s the size of a whale and Prentiss needs more aspirin than is in the whole city of Las Vegas.”

“How--why--” Reid fought back the wave of questions trying to spill out and finally settled on, “Did Gideon sign off on this?”

“Gideon will like it or Gideon will shut up about it,” Rossi said cheerfully. His laughing face grew briefly serious. “Kid, Gideon knows that some cases--sometimes not even your own cases--they stick in the craw, and you’re less than useless until you’ve sorted it out. I just had to remind him of that fact a little.”

“Oh god,” Reid said, “I’m fired, aren’t I.”

“You’re not fired,” Rossi said, amused. “You think Gideon has never gotten a whiff of something he wasn’t even supposed to be sniffing around and pursued it to the ends of the earth? You have met him.”

Reid struggled with a deep-rooted desire to keep this, if he was right about his father, incredibly personal thing private, but welling up inside of him was a much stronger gratitude and awe. He’d never had--and he knew this sounded sad-- _friends_ growing up. Over the last few years there’d been Aaron, who was so much to him that words like _friend_ or _husband_ or _significant other_ seemed to buckle under the weight of describing it. But this--this was something entirely new. “Guys,” he said, and couldn’t get out anything else. They seemed to understand.

Morgan flipped the TV to mute--though he did not, Reid noticed, turn it off--and leaned forward, the picture of a profiler at a case briefing. “So catch us up. What do you have?”

Reid took a deep breath and plunged forward. “I have a suspect.”

Rossi’s eyebrows went up. “Morgan filled me in. I thought the police came up empty.”

“It’s not from the police file,” Reid said. “I think--I think my father killed Riley Jenkins.”  
  
  
  
Rossi and Morgan paused. Clearly, whatever they had come here expecting, it hadn’t been this.

“What makes you say that?” Morgan felt out cautiously.

“Last night, the--the dream I told you about, it changed. I caught him. Dumping the body.”

“What’s the relationship like?” Rossi said, sharp-eyed.

“He… he left, when I was ten. Couldn’t handle my mom anymore, I guess. I, uh. I haven’t spoken to him in seventeen years.” Reid tried to lay out the facts steadily, dispassionately, as though he could create distance between himself and his suspicions just by wanting it hard enough.

“Reid,” Morgan said, “you don’t think a dream about the father who abandoned you killing your son might have another meaning?”

Rossi shot him a quick look. Evidently Morgan hadn’t spilled all the gory details of his nightmares to everyone on his team. Well, until now. Resigned to the knowledge that this particular secret had become yet another casualty of profiling’s endless war on privacy, he said, “I know how it sounds. But I just have this feeling. I can’t shake it.” He took a breath. “I need to know.”

Morgan and Rossi exchanged looks. Rossi leaned forward, no longer playing the part of effusive Italian uncle, all focused edges and unerring instinct. “Reid. The man we’re looking for raped and killed a six-year-old boy. You have to think about the implications of what you’re suggesting. We don’t have to go any farther. It’s up to you.”

Reid pulled back, stunned at the thought that two of the most zealous enforcers of justice he’d ever met would agree to not do everything in their power to put a child molester away--for him. For his own peace of mind, for whatever he might discover about his own past, for the way having a murderer for a father would color everything forever. “I want to,” he said shakily. “I need to. I need to know.”

“Okay,” Rossi said. “Show us the files.”  
  
  
  
Too-strong coffee and ideas bouncing between them. If not for the fact they were crammed into Reid’s hotel room, it could’ve been any other case briefing.

“Riley Jenkins was last seen at 4PM on June 2nd, 1986, leaving T-ball practice. His father was supposed to pick him up, but got delayed, so he walked the three blocks home,” Morgan read out.

“And he was found at 7:15 when his mother got home from work. In the space of three hours, someone managed to gain entrance into the house, assault, and kill him,” Rossi added.

“Classic mixed organization. He’d been planning this for a long time until he finally couldn’t control his desires any longer--but he never thought past the initial moment of assault,” Morgan said. “Guy realizes he has a witness, panics, stabs the boy.”

“And duct-tapes his mouth postmortem in a fit of extreme paranoia,” Rossi said.

“I can see why the detective would’ve focused on the family first--whoever it was took a big risk staging the assault in the house instead of taking Riley to a secure location. Must’ve been someone familiar with the Jenkins’ patterns, someone who knew that he’d have free reign of the house for hours,” Morgan mused.

“And familiar with the neighborhood,” Rossi added. “This man felt comfortable enough to attack Riley in his own home. That’s not something you do outside your comfort zone.”

Familiar with the neighborhood. Reid bit his lip as he studied the attached small-scale map, streets and blocks neatly laid out in plain black grids. Morgan noticed, of course. “What’s up, kid?”

“I lived ten blocks away from the Jenkinses,” Reid said quietly.

“You think you knew him?” Rossi probed.

“I--I don’t know. I think… I think we might have been on the same T-ball team. I think my dad coached it.”

“That _would_ give him the kind of access and familiarity preferential offenders look for,” Rossi said carefully.

“We can still stop this, Reid,” Morgan said.

“I need to know,” Reid said softly. He looked up, determination renewed. “So let’s start with victimology. We need to talk to Lou Jenkins.”  
  
  
  
“Are you out of your--” he spat a word not fit for polite company-- “minds?”

Lou Jenkins had not aged well. He was a lifelong construction worker, and it showed in his weathered hands and workman’s squint. His beard was unkempt, trucker chic, and his eyes were rimmed with the red of a seasoned day drinker. But there was something else about him, some palpable aura of terrible grief, that was what everyone who came in contact with him really noticed first. Is this what losing a child does to you, Spencer wondered, and then shut that firmly out of his mind.

God, he was glad that Jack was tucked safely away in DC, though.

“Just questions,” Morgan said placatingly. “We’re just interested in catching the man who killed Riley.”

“You come to my work, you drag all this up after twenty years--” Lou sputtered, turning increasingly red.

Sometimes, Spencer frightened himself. Most of the time, it was his mind that he worried about--whether brilliance came with a cost, whether his brain would turn on him the way his mother’s had with her, what was insight and what were symptoms. But his passions, too, could flare quickly and fiercely and leave him shaking. When he’d met Aaron, he’d fallen headlong in love so quickly that he’d been left doing research on neurotransmitters and hormone regulation for weeks trying to figure out precisely what had happened to him. Other times, a vicious magnesium-and-water anger would rise up out of him, and that frightened him most of all--how much he could want someone to _hurt,_ how easy it was to loose his tongue to cut. That trembling fury gripped him now. “If it were my son who were killed,” he said, coolness cracked through with strains of rage, rage that this man could _forget_ , could put his own peace of mind above justice, “I would think that I’d do absolutely anything to help find his killer, no matter how long it’s been.”

“Reid,” Morgan said.

Lou had turned on him, looking very much like he was going to stave Spencer’s head in with the pipes he was loading into the back of a pick-up, but Morgan’s interjection made him pause. He stopped. “Reid?” he asked. Reid could see the moment he put it together as an almost physical blow that rocked him backwards. “Spencer? Spencer Reid?”

Reid smiled humorlessly. So he had known Riley. “Mr. Jenkins.”

“My god,” Lou said. A tentative smile broke out on his face. “Little Spencer Reid with the FBI. Who would’ve thought.”

It was a common enough response from those who had known him when he was the only twelve-year-old in the class of 1994. It usually rankled. But now Reid could see something else in Lou--that terrible sadness again as he looked Reid over, imagining some other boy in his place. Reid was familiar with the sensation. Just as quickly as it had surged up, his rage slackened, diminished. He couldn’t imagine the loss this man had suffered, this analogue of himself, as Jack was to Riley. Or rather, he could, and it paralyzed him. He opened his mouth, hesitated.

“We just want to ask you some questions about William Reid,” Morgan cut in. Reid closed his eyes, suddenly grateful that Morgan had insisted on coming along with him to question Mr. Jenkins.

“About--Spencer, I don’t understand.”

“How familiar was my father with the layout of your house?” Reid said.

“He’d come over sometimes--barbecue, block party--why’re you asking?" Lou asked, baffled.

“Was he close to Riley?” Reid pressed.

Lou looked at him helplessly. “Why are you doing this?”

“Just questions, Mr. Jenkins,” Morgan said soothingly.

“No, they’re not. You can’t possibly think-- _you_ can’t possibly think--William Reid did not kill my son. End of discussion,” he said, in the tone that indicated they were well and truly not going to get anything else out of this particular witness. “Get off my work site.”

“Okay,” Morgan said softly. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Jenkins.”

He started to back away towards the SUV, but Reid lingered, seized by a sudden bravery to ask the one question he should’ve started with. “Know where we could find him? My dad?”

Lou squinted, wiped sweat off his face, softer now that they’d stopped trying to interrogate him about what was undoubtedly the worst period of his life. “It’s been years, but he’s still probably at that same firm. In Summerlin.”

Summerlin. Reid spun on his heel and stalked to the SUV. Morgan followed in his wake, concerned and confused. “Summerlin?”

“About nine miles east of here,” he said, clipped, and maybe twelve miles from the house they’d moved to, the house he and Diana had stayed in until both of them were unable to stay any longer, for different reasons. “Ten minutes away. He never let me know.”

Morgan was quiet. He rarely talked about his own father, but when he did, Reid could tell he’d worshipped him. His family stories were more frequent, and filled with love and clamor. Reid suspected he didn’t know how to comfort someone who came from his particular kind of broken home.

They met Rossi in the car, which he’d kept running so he could blast the AC. “Any luck?” he pushed his sunglasses up to peer at them more closely.

“He’s closed off,” Morgan reported, throwing himself into the case to distract himself from the hurts he couldn’t help. “Can’t blame him.” 

Reid climbed in behind them, jaw clenched. He listened with one ear to Morgan rehashing the conversation and with the other seemed to hear phantom remnants of a conversation from long ago. _“If you refuse to take care of yourself, I can’t help you.”_

What hurt the most, after all these years, was his father gently but firmly telling him, _“We’re not statistics, Spencer._ ” Strange how one sentence could shatter everything about how he’d seen the world: that if you paid enough attention, you could understand it, that the world was fundamentally knowable, predictable. That people acted on the numbers and not their hearts. He’d been in ninth grade then, and just starting to look up the statistics about bullying. And it was this, more than being stripped and tied naked to the goal posts, more than being beaten on and kicked around, that convinced him that the world could be awful in its cruelty, that at times it strained the bounds of statistics until no numbers could sum up the pain of individual experience. It was why he’d studied behavior, that strange and nebulous thing that could not be predicted, could not be measured. It was why he was here now.

He noticed that Rossi and Morgan had fallen silent. He unclenched his jaw and looked up at them; they were looking back with concern. “I asked, did you still want to interview your mother?” Rossi said.

“No,” Reid said. “Get on I-95. I know where we’re going.”  
  
  
  
A true man of habit, William Reid had worked for Wieder, Kierschenbaum & Moore for longer than Spencer had been alive. Dully, he filed that extreme adherence to routine under the list of ways in which his father fit the profile. He’d been here a few times before his father had left--left his family, but not the rest of his life, stayed with his cushy job in the city he loved--Take Your Child to Work Day, things like that. But it was only distantly familiar. They’d gotten new furniture. The reception desk was closer to the entrance now. Reid walked into the law firm and immediately felt sick. It didn’t seem right, to confront a man he still envisioned as looking exactly like he had when he was ten in this new, modern place where every discrepancy reminded him of the time that had passed.

The receptionist was new, too, a pretty young black woman who was as far from arthritic old Mrs. Dempsey, who’d always slipped him candies under the desk, as it was possible to be. “Can I help you?” she smiled at them.

“Yeah,” Reid said, and his voice failed.

“Here to see William Reid,” Rossi took over smoothly. Again, Reid felt a terrible gratitude that the two of them were here, for him, when they could have been literally anywhere else on the planet that was less awkward.

“Is he expecting you?”

Rossi flipped open his creds and said, wryly, “I don’t think so.”

The receptionist bustled off. Reid wet his lips. His mind, which he was usually unable to shut up even when he wanted to, had gone utterly blank at the thought of seeing his father again. He tried to envision what he would say and was met with white noise.

Morgan leaned in. Obviously some of this had shown on his face. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Reid said blindly, “I’m just gonna--just--bathroom.”

He leaned on the sink, inspecting his face. He was _not_ prettying himself up to make a good impression. He was just--assessing. Trying to wipe away all doubt and fear. Trying to concentrate on the fact that he was confronting a potential murderer, which ironically would’ve been more soothing than the knowledge pounding in his head that he was going to see his father. 

The door creaked open behind him. He didn’t jump; he could hear the soft tread of Rossi’s ridiculously expensive shoes on the floor.

“It’s okay if you’re not, you know,” Rossi said as he came up to him to inspect himself in the mirror as well.

“I _am_ fine,” Reid said firmly, like that would make it true. He’d been doing that a lot lately. Maybe he’d been doing it for most of his life.

“You know, Morgan and I can do this ourselves. He might actually respond better in front of strangers he doesn’t have to save face with.”

Reid laughed bitterly, incredulously. “He doesn’t care about my good opinion, trust me.” Once you abandoned someone you had to resign yourself to being despised for life, didn’t you? Reid thought about what it would take for him to leave Jack and came up blank as a new beginning. Thought about Jack hating him, resenting him, and how he would deserve it. His anger deepened.

“All I’m saying is you don’t have to do this alone.”

Reid turned abruptly and splashed water on his face. It jolted him back to awareness. He turned newly-clear eyes on Rossi and said, “Why are you and Morgan here _really?_ Why are the two of you okay to just go along with this? I--I know what it looks like, okay. Why are you so determined to back me up?”

Rossi eyed him solemnly. Then he reached into his pocket and drew out a bracelet. He dropped it into Reid’s palm. Reid shut his mouth and examined it. Three charms dangled from it, each with a name: Alicia, Connie, Georgie. But Rossi didn’t have children. Reid looked at him quizzically.

“1988. I’d already been with the BAU for ten years, but it was one of the first times I was on the scene in the immediate aftermath of a crime. The blood--we were halfway down the street when we started hearing the screams. Three kids, covered in their parents’ blood. I kept coming back to that case for eighteen years, Spencer. Bought the crime scene when it came on the market, left the kids messages every year. It was why I came back to the BAU. But it wasn’t why I stayed.”

Reid swallowed. “So what happened?”

“The team did,” Rossi said simply, and clapped Reid on his shoulder. “You don’t have to do this alone, kiddo. Trust me. I know. I keep the bracelet to remind me of that.”

Reid closed his eyes, feeling steadier at last than when he’d stumbled into the bathroom. “Thanks, Rossi,” he said lowly.

“Anytime, kid. Now come on. Your dad’s probably waiting for us.”

Rossi was right.  
  
  
  


If he had to choose one word to describe that particular encounter with his father, he would probably pick--disastrous.  
  
  
  
Seeing his father again was like seeing the office, but worse. His hair had lightened; there were gray streaks in his sideburns. There were new--or, well, probably not new, but new to him--creases by his eyes and mouth. His skin had taken on the soft, dry quality of the middle-aged. But his face was exactly the same. If it hadn’t been for Rossi, Reid might have faltered at the dissonance between the familiar and unfamiliar writ large on his father’s altered but utterly unchanged face. 

He was speaking to Morgan when they exited the bathroom. “My son?” he was saying, alarm in his voice. “Did--did something happen?”

He thought this was notification. Reid wondered distantly if his mother or Aaron would even ask for his father to be notified if something did end up happening to him. “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” he said.

William Reid’s eyes snapped to his, and for the first time in seventeen years Reid experienced the full weight of his father’s attention. William reeled back; Reid didn’t. He’d pulled himself together sufficiently to face his father with equanimity, more or less. “Hello, dad,” he said.

At last, something like a smile settled on William’s face. “Spencer,” he breathed. A hot flush of rage slipped through Reid; he thought this was a happy reunion? He thought all was forgiven? Reid would show him--

But that wouldn’t be very professional. He was here to get answers about a murder. He tamped down the anger and followed his father into his office.

“You don’t look like me anymore,” William said once they’d settled in, Morgan looming, as was his wont, and Rossi lounging comfortably on one of his office chairs. “You used to, everyone said so.” He was smiling. Reid had never been one to resort to violence, but he kind of wanted to punch that smile off of his face. He could make a cutting remark on prolonged mutual exposure. 

_Steady,_ said the voice in his head which sounded annoyingly like Aaron. He was facing a murder suspect, not his father. Just another unsub in his comfort zone--his office--and Reid would need all of his guile to knock him off-balance. “We’re not here for personal reasons,” he said coolly. “We’re investigating a cold case. Riley Jenkins. Do you remember him?”

“Of course,” William said, his mouth tight. Reid watched for microexpressions. “It was--terrible. You think--you think I could help you with that?”

“Possibly,” Rossi said dryly.

“What do you remember about the case?” Morgan asked diplomatically.

“Honestly, I’m sure the papers would be able to tell you more than I could,” William hedged. No flickering of his eyes; no visible tells. Either he was innocent or a sociopath. “But the whole neighborhood was devastated when it happened. We--” his eyes shot to Reid-- “we used to live near the Jenkinses, you know.”

“Yes,” Reid said flatly, “I know.”

“But you knew Riley, didn’t you?” Morgan pressed. “You coached his T-ball team.”

William paused. Wet his lips. “What is this about?”

“Do you know what I do at the BAU, dad?” Reid said abruptly.

“Of course,” he said, though there was no _of course_ about knowing the exact job description of the son you hadn’t spoken to in seventeen years. “Behavioral analysts, right? You generate psychological profiles of criminals. Help out police with serial killers and things like that.”

“Well, we worked up a cursory profile of the offender in the Riley Jenkins case. We’re looking for someone who would’ve been in his twenties to thirties then, fifties now.”

“Judging by the location the body was found, we’re looking for someone familiar with the neighborhood. This was not done by a stranger lurking on a street corner,” Rossi jumped in. Again, Reid felt a rush of gratefulness that they insisted on coming with him, covering up his soft spots and vulnerabilities so they could present an iron front to this man in front of him.

“Preferential offenders seek out kids to prey on,” Morgan added. “So we’re looking for someone with access, someone who works with kids for a living or recreationally.” 

“What are you saying?” William’s voice had grown higher with anger. “Are you--you can’t possibly be implying that you think _I_ killed Riley Jenkins?”

“Did you?” Reid said meanly.

“No! Spencer, how could you even ask me that--”

Another flare of that hot, messy anger which made him frightened of himself sometimes. “Well, it’s not like I really know you, is it? Not anymore.”

“We’d--” Rossi broke in, sensing a tempest from the stunned, hurt look on William Reid’s face and the way his son’s had gone carefully blank-- “just like your cooperation. Permission to search your laptop, your house. That’s all.”

“That’s all--?!” William sputtered. “No. Absolutely not. You think I’m a suspect? Make your case to a judge.”

“Why protest if you have nothing to hide?” Reid said.

“I’m a lawyer, son--”

“ _Don’t call me that,_ ” Spencer spit out. The room spun into silence.

William swallowed, a complicated expression on his face that Reid was terminally uninterested in untangling. “Spencer,” he said. “I have a right to privacy that I’m not required or even obligated to give up because of some half-baked theory about me being a murderer. You know that, too.”

Rossi cleared his throat and stood up. Morgan, too, moved to leave; requests for warrants and lawyers inevitably shut down all lines of communication. “Well,” Rossi said, not as jovial as usual, “Thank you for your time, Mr. Reid.”

“Yeah, dad,” Spencer said, affecting a deliberate casualness that he was sure was fooling nobody but was definitely conveying how unbelievably pissed off he was. “You’ve certainly helped our investigation.”

If he had to choose one word to describe the particular expression on his father’s face as they swirled out in a blaze of officialdom, he would probably pick… sad. But that little nugget of information had no place in his understanding of his father, so he packed it away and turned his focus, sharper than ever, back to the murdered child haunting him.  
  
  
  
“You… want me to hack your dad’s files?” Garcia asked hesitantly. “Are you sure about this?”

Reid took a deep breath and tried not to take his exhaustion at hearing that question out on Garcia, since after all this was the first time she’d asked it. “You know,” he said wryly, “I really wish people would stop asking me that.” He swung open his hotel door; he’d headed up to get a moment alone after the conversation with his father had gotten more heated than expected. Garcia’s voice on the other end of the line was cool, refreshing, not an irritant at all, unlike the way Morgan and Rossi had been buzzing over him since they’d left his dad’s office in a cloud of ill-humor. His foot struck something soft. He looked down. A case file had been shoved under his door.  
  
  
  
“Okay,” Morgan said after perusing the Gary Brendan Michaels file, “that’s suspicious.”

“Right?” Reid raked a hand through his hair, pleased that at last someone was seeing it from his point of view. “An hour after talking to our only suspect someone drops off another _at my hotel room_?”

“Only three people in this city even know we’re investigating the Riley Jenkins murder,” Rossi mused. Detective Hyde, Lou Jenkins… and William Reid. None of them had been told Reid’s hotel and room number.

Rossi tilted the file at him. “You remember him?”

“I--I don’t know.” A memory flashed into his mind. Chess at the park, the man on the file smiling at him, but it was blurred with time and lost childhood. And, Reid reminded himself bitterly, the possibility that it was a false recovered memory, a trick of his mind brought on by his intense attempts to remember something, anything, about being four years old, and the stimulus of the file in front of him. He’d never liked the possibility that his mind could be tricked. “I think I--I--I might--no. I’m not sure.”

“Okay,” Morgan said kindly. “Look at this--exposed himself to a minor.”

“That’s a precursor to molestation,” Rossi put in.

“And murder,” Morgan said. “I have to admit, he does fit the profile. We’ll get Garcia to look into it and take everything we learn with a grain of salt.”

Reid exhaled and rocked back on his heels, not sure why he’d been so worried that they wouldn’t recognize how sketchy this whole situation was. Somehow, his quest for the truth had turned into a desire to prove to Morgan and Rossi the vague suspicion that was in his heart, as though by convincing them, he could make it real. 

On cue, Morgan’s phone trilled with the sound of Garcia calling in with her phone-a-friend magic. “What’ve you got for me, sweetheart?” Morgan asked.

“Whatever you want, my beauties,” Garcia said sweetly, all honey and laughter. “I’m not interfering with some sexy boy-time bonding, am I?”

“Girl, what do you think we get up to when you’re not around?” Morgan asked, amused.

“Oh, I couldn’t even _begin_ to imagine,” Garcia purred. “Pics or it didn’t happen. You there, Reid?”

“I’m here,” Reid said, a faint squeak in his voice at the thought of what Garcia might reveal to him.

“Well, we’ve been up, down, and all over your father’s files, and I can tell you with certainty that this man is not storing illegal porn on any of his servers, work, home, or otherwise.”

Reid swallowed, unsure whether to feel relief or disappointment. “His finances?”

Prentiss’s voice crackled over the speaker. “Aside from a ticket to see Celine Dion in concert six months ago, nothing questionable on that front, either. Sorry, Reid.”

“Is hidden activity possible? The kind that wouldn’t show up on a cursory internet and finances check?”

“Hey, there is nothing cursory about my checks,” Garcia said. “And it’s always a possibility, but you’d usually see large cash withdrawals, suspiciously regular unexplained expenses, and I don’t see any of that here. Sorry, kiddo.”

Reid bit his lip and didn’t say anything. Prentiss said, “We can tell you other things? If you want to know.”

“Okay,” he said quietly.

“Well. he's a workaholic; somehow he manages to log more hours than we do. Still doing tort law, gets good performance reviews, was considered for a promotion to partner status last year but ultimately turned it down. He makes decent money but doesn't spend a lot of it, except on Celine Dion tickets, apparently, has a modest house in a pretty quiet neighborhood, drives a hybrid. Not much of a social life here; no meals out with friends or dates. He goes to the movies a lot, buys Isaac Asmiov first editions, collects records, and that's about it.” Reid sucked in a breath; he remembered that. His mom would read Margery Kempe and John Donne to him, his dad would read Asimov and Heinlein. “Not a lot of other expenses aside from veterinary bills for what seems like a very sick cat.”

“There is one other thing he’s interested in,” Garcia said. “He’s archived like a thousand articles on one topic.”

“What is it?”

“You.” Garcia sounded pleased with herself. “He’s got local human-interest articles about how much of a boy genius you are, copies of your dissertations, everything you’ve ever published. He even has that article you wrote on the Blue Ridge Strangler for the _Journal of Psychology and Behavioral Science_ , and that’s not even out yet, he has the peer review copy.”

Rage flared in him again. “So he Googled me. That makes up for a lifetime of abandonment,” he snapped. Without waiting for an answer he slipped past Rossi and Morgan who’d converged on him like two massive man-shaped lumps of misplaced comfort and--well, there wasn’t really any word for it but _stormed off_.

He cooled his heels by the eponymous fountain outside, a boxy modern art piece that was all blocks and blobs. He stared moodily into the spray and considered that there was another reason why he needed to find the truth, and he needed to find it now: there was no way he could go back to face Jack in this state, volatile and about to explode at any mention of fatherhood. The thought of Jack calmed him. He wondered what Jack would think of the fountain; imagining him splashing and clambering over the curves and ridges of the sculpture that was definitely not meant to be climbed calmed him even more. 

After a while of thinking about fountains and laughters and promises that fathers make to their sons (an enraging topic, but less so when he considered Jack), Morgan found him there.

“Hey,” he said, settling beside him on the bench facing the courtyard and fountain. “We’ve been looking for you, you know.”

“Sorry,” Reid mumbled.

“I told Garcia to look into this Gary Michaels. Hopefully she’ll turn up something definitive about his connection to the case.” Reid said nothing. Morgan sighed and leaned back, letting the spray of the fountain drizzle over him. “I know you’re not okay. No one would be, given what we’re investigating. Rossi and me, and the girls back at Quantico--we’re all here for you. For whatever you need. But you’ve gotta talk to us, or we can’t help you.”

Reid laughed, a cracked, bitter sound. Once, he’d seen a picture of Elle Greenaway. Pretty heart-shaped face, elegant roman nose, dark eyes that reminded him of--well, it didn’t matter. “How are you still with me on this? How have you not just written me off as someone else who couldn’t hack it in the BAU? I know how… unprofessional I’m being.”

Morgan snorted. “Kid, you’re lucky you weren’t on the team yet when Gideon took off for a few months after Adrian Bale blew up half the unit. That’s when Rossi came out of retirement, and for ages, he was a gigantic pain in our collective asses, don’t let the jovial uncle thing fool you. Finally started to mellow out after the rest of the team muscled our way in on a case that’d been bugging him for eighteen years, this double homicide, left three kids orphaned.”

“He told me,” Reid said softly.

“Did he tell you it wasn’t even his case? The whole BAU was there barging our way in on a local murder with no connection to Rossi except that he’d been on the scene decades ago. And I can tell you, it wasn’t because we liked him or out of the goodness of our hearts. It was because we’re a team, and we have each other’s backs. Me, a couple years ago I got arrested in Chicago. This cop who’d been hassling me since I was a kid came this close to charging me with murder. Turns out… It turns out it was this community center coordinator. The man who…” Morgan paused. He seemed to struggle with himself before he looked up and pinned Reid with a look so searingly empathetic that Reid, who’d never gotten an implication in his life before meeting Aaron, understood all at once. “Point is, I get it, Reid. Everyone’s got baggage. Ours… ours brought us to the FBI.”

Reid swallowed. “What happens if I find out…” He trailed off. Morgan’s infinitely kind eyes didn’t leave him. They both knew the statistics. Victims of child molestation were most likely victimized by someone under the same roof.

“Listen to me, Reid,” he said. “Whatever you find or don’t find out on this case, you can _always_ talk to me.”

“And you won’t tell Gideon and Rossi?” Reid asked wryly.

“Ouch. I deserved that,” Morgan grinned. “But no. I promise. Unless it affects the health of the team, I will keep your confidences.”

Reid smiled back tentatively. Morgan’s regard felt like a bulwark against the dark yawning potential of this case. A touchstone to ground him, like Aaron and Jack. A friendship.

“So what now?” he asked. “Wait for Garcia to call back?”

“Actually, I was thinking. You said you weren’t sure if you knew Gary Michaels, right?”

“Right…” Reid said hesitantly.

“I have an idea.”  
  
  
  
“You’ve never done one of these before, have you?” Morgan asked.

Reid shook his head. “I know the theory--the encoding specificity principle states that recalling memories is more effective when similar stimuli takes place at the moment of recall, and the multi-component view of memory--"

“All right, all right. What’s important with cognitive interviews is that I need you to relax. You’re in a safe space right now.”

“I _am_ relaxed,” Reid said petulantly. “This is me, relaxed.”

Morgan quirked an eyebrow. “The encoding specificity principle, Reid?”

“Theoretical psychology is relaxing,” Reid insisted. 

Back in his hotel room, Morgan and Rossi had explained to him how they used cognitive interviews as a tool of last resort for prying accurate information out of eyewitnesses when the only thing they had to go on was someone’s memories. Then Rossi had taken his leave while Morgan relaxed and slipped into a slow, soothing voice. Reid understood; Rossi was not exactly the most calming of personalities to be around. “Just… try to be less high-strung. It works better that way.”

Reid exhaled forcibly and tried to blank out his thoughts. He could always try tapping into the well of fierce rage he had for his father--that tended to drive out any other thoughts from his mind--but he rather suspected that would not be quite conducive to relaxation. “What now?”

“Close your eyes. Now, take me back to what you remember about being four, the week before your parents told you you were moving. What time of year was it?”

Hot. Sticky on his skin. Panting in the dugout as he watched a curly-haired boy step up to the plate. The stinging sweetness of honey mesquite and desert willow in bloom. “Spring. It was spring… almost summer. School had just gotten out. All the parents wanted some place to stick their kids, so T-ball.”

“Focus on those memories. Those sounds, those smells. You were sitting in the park…”

“Playing chess,” Reid heard himself say, as though he had briefly drifted outside himself. “I used to play chess with myself in the park. Sometimes people would come up and play with me.”

“What did the pieces feel like when you touched them?”

“Smooth. Wood. They were the good kind of chess pieces, heavy, made to play on one of the big boards.”

“Focus on the weight in your hand. What else do you feel? What else did you smell?”

“My glasses… mosquitoes. Sometimes people would barbecue in the park… roasting meat and charcoal…”

“Good. Someone walks up to you. Who is he?”

80’s glasses perched on a thin nose. An avaricious gleam in his eyes. _Hey, you’re pretty good._ Reid’s eyes slammed open. “No. Nope. I’m sorry. I can’t--I can’t remember.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Morgan was reaching for him. “It’s okay. Reid, you’re okay.”

Reid hunched over and stuck his face in his hands. He was not hyperventilating. He was doing something else that people who were not having panic attacks did. Morgan’s hand rested on his shoulder and he shuddered it off, remembering too late that it was Morgan. He hung back, let him catch his breath, regain his composure. Too late, Reid shamefully pulled himself together.

“Sorry,” he said miserably. “I know you wanted--I thought I could remember. Sorry.”

“Well, you definitely remembered something,” Morgan said. “Look, I’d like to try again. Not focusing on Gary Michaels this time, just what you remember about the murder.”

Honestly, Reid thought as he remembered the pulse-pounding terror of getting a flash of Gary Michaels’s face, there was nothing he wanted to do less. But Morgan was trying to help him solve this the profiler’s way, instead of lurching along from gut instinct to gut instinct, which was what Reid knew he would’ve done without the moderating presence of Morgan and Rossi by his side. He nodded reluctantly.

Morgan shifted and let him settle back where he had been perched on the edge of his hotel bed. “Okay. Let’s try this again. Just relax. You’re in a safe place…”

When he felt he had calmed enough to enter another spin cycle, Morgan asked him about what he remembered hearing about Riley Jenkins.

He didn’t recall when he got the news that Riley was dead, or anything other than the vague sense that one day he was aware of Riley as a distant friend and then, some time later, being sure that Riley was gone. He did remember an argument.

“Okay, take me back to that night. Where were you?”

“In my room.” This, at least, he could picture perfectly: the shelves laden with books, Dickens and Defoe and _Grey’s Anatomy_ , the historically accurate medieval knight toys his mother had bought him as her one concession to childish whimsy, the posters on the wall of space and astronauts, his second love, after magic. Lying in that bed in his old patterned blue pajamas. Jack had blue pajamas as well. He’d never made that connection before.

Outside, his mother screaming something. His father shouting back. He tried to focus on what they were saying, but it slipped away from him, as smooth as glass. He couldn’t even be sure why he was convinced this was connected to the Riley Jenkins case, except a feeling of foreboding that only increased the longer he languished in the memory.

His father’s voice swelling, loud and strident until it took over the whole memory-- _I’m not going to discuss it anymore!_

“They’re yelling… I can’t hear… except him… he says that he won’t discuss it anymore…”

“Okay, good. Good, Reid. Follow that sound. What do you hear next?”

The door creaking. The crisp thud of dress shoes, not his mother’s slippered shuffle.

“He’s coming in,” he whispered.

The weight of his father on the other side of the bed. His soft grip on Spencer’s shoulder. _I know you’re awake, Spencer. Daddy loves you, you know that?_

Anger reared again like a coiled snake in Reid’s belly, his now-self interfering with his then-self, and he wasn’t sure what caused him to recoil, the way those words seemed so hollow and lifeless from a man he knew would abandon him in just six years-- _when I tell my son I love him I mean it, how could you, how could you feel what I feel and just walk away--_ or the utter bone-deep dread of what might have come next if his father had indeed raped and killed Riley Jenkins. In spite of his best efforts his eyes slid open. Morgan was looking at him with a complicated expression.

“I can’t,” Reid whispered.

“Okay,” Morgan said soothingly. “Okay. Let that memory fade. Think about the next morning instead. What do you see?”

With difficulty, Reid closed his eyes again and thought of the sun.

Sun falling through the blinds as he crept into the living room. Even at four, before the worst of his mother’s schizophrenic breaks, before it became just him and her tiptoeing around a house made of eggshells, he remembered this: how to make yourself quiet and see the things that no one wanted you to see. His mother in her pink knit dressing gown. Her long fingers spread across her face, a portrait of agony.

“Why was she crying, Reid?”

She turned away. He wanted to see. He crept to the window, which looked out over their backyard, the garden, the fire pit--

His father, standing there, using a poker to turn over--

“What is it?”

A blue shirt, dark pants--

“What was your father burning?”

Blood--

Reid snapped back into awareness and ran into the bathroom to dry-heave into the sink.  
  
  
  
“Spencer,” his mother said, an awful note of confusion that he’d heard way too much of over his life in her voice, “I thought you’d gone.”

He didn’t smile. “Mom, I need to talk to you.”

She tried to entice him into a game of Scrabble. The thought of sitting calmly and trying to gently coax the answers out of her set his hair on end. He paced instead, fully aware that he was not making her any calmer or more coherent but unable to control his restless need to move anyway. In that, at least, he’d always been like her. “We need to talk about Riley Jenkins.”

“Riley Jenkins?” she said. “I told you, he was a story. Just a story you made up.”

“No.” Reid shoved a hand through his hair. “He was two years older than me. He played on my T-ball team. His father’s name was Lou and he was raped and murdered when he was six years old just a half mile from where we lived.”

“You had a dream,” Diana said, sounding not all there herself.

That spike of pulsing rage again. _Just because you can’t tell reality from your imagination doesn’t mean I can’t._ He swallowed it down because if anyone didn’t deserve his fury at the moment, _anyone,_ it was his mother, and he said, more calmly. “Look, mom. Here’s the case file. Look.”

Slowly her eyes slid down to the file he had proffered to her. He watched as she read the name, the crime--her hand came to her mouth involuntarily--she leaned back, stunned. “Oh my god. Oh, Riley.”

“Do you remember now?” Spencer asked urgently.

“Yes. Yes. You were right. Oh, poor Riley.”

“Yes. Yes. What about him?”

“I just knew. I’m sorry,” she babbled. “I shouldn’t have said anything. But I knew.”

Ice slipped down his spine. In spite of himself, he hadn’t really believed that his father could have hurt _him._ “What? What do you mean, you just knew?”

“We just know, Spencer. A mother knows. A mother knows. We feel things.”

“Was Dad involved in what happened to Riley Jenkins?” he asked impatiently, no time to decipher her, and it was a rusty skill anyway, he hadn’t spoken to her outside of his letters to her in so long. This was far from good investigating procedure, he knew he was leading the witness and making her recollections even more unreliable than usual, but he had to know. He had to know.

She looked up, bewildered. “Dad? No--why would you--”

“Because I _remember,_ Mom. I remember. You were watching him burn someone’s bloody clothes. What happened? What did he do to get blood on those clothes?”

“No,” she said more to herself than to him. “No, no. That was--you’re wrong. No.”

“I’m not. I know I’m not. Please, Mom, think back. You were watching him and crying. Why were you crying?”

“No, no, no.” Diana pulled back and rubbed at her forehead, hard. “No, no. You’re wrong. You’re wrong.” Spencer watched with horror as he recognized the signs of an acute psychotic break. “No! No!” She thrashed. Spencer reached out, grabbed her forearms, tried to restrain her--remembered being twelve and doing the same thing, too small to make much difference--resenting his father even then for leaving him alone with her, no one else to take care of her--

“Mom,” he said helplessly.

She started to scream.

Orderlies rushed in to take her from him, one with a syringe saying in her most soothing tones, “This is just something to help you calm down, Diana,” and Reid leaned back, defeated, fully aware that he wouldn’t get anything coherent out of her for two hours, at least, if he was lucky; the way just asking had set her off meant that more likely he wouldn’t get be getting answers out of her at all. The afternoon, wasted. Only two people knew what happened in Spencer’s memory, and one was a paranoid schizophrenic and the other was a suspect.

He could use that, he realized. If Diana wouldn’t talk, maybe William would.

“It could’ve been you,” Diana rasped, and once more chill fingers swept down his spine.  
  
  
  
“I _don’t_ think this is a good idea,” Morgan cautioned.

“He’s the only other person who knows what happened that night. Three people in that house and my memory’s fuzzy, my mom’s incoherent for god knows how long--he’s our only shot at finding out what went on.”

Reid strode past the light-walled stucco detached houses and the Brutalist office buildings that littered this part of Las Vegas, Morgan keeping pace with him as they made their way to the station. “What went on? Reid, all you’ve got is a fragment of a memory and a theory that _your mother_ agreed to cover up the rape and murder of a little boy to protect your father. Now, I don’t know her, but does that sound like her?”

It--no, actually. “Learning that your spouse is a killer makes people behave in strange ways,” Reid said fiercely. “It’s hardly uncommon, wives of killers behaving as passive witnesses to their husbands’ crimes.”

“You gotta be careful, Reid. Considering your father as a potential suspect is one thing; building an elaborate theory involving cover-ups and collusion is another. You’re losing objectivity. You need to make sure that you’re twisting your theories to suit facts, not facts to suit theories.”

“All right, Sherlock Holmes,” Reid snapped, “how’s this for facts? Fact: _something_ happened twenty-two years ago and it led to my father burning bloody clothes in our backyard. Fact: the only thing my mother seems to know is that she knew _something_ about the murder, told someone, and regretted it. Fact: Someone has a clear interest in diverting our attention _away_ from my father--”

“Fact: Your father doesn’t fit the profile of a preferential child offender,” Morgan interrupted. “Fact: There have been _no_ cases with a similar MO since Riley Jenkins’s death. Fact: You are spiraling--”

“You said you were with me, Morgan,” Reid said. “All the way.”

That shut Morgan up. He pulled back just as they reached the station. Reid glanced up and caught the haggard figure of Lou Jenkins as he slipped out of the building and back onto the street.  
  
  
  
“No,” Hyde said.

“What?” Reid sputtered.

“You want to drag a man you have no evidence on into interrogation for a decades-old cold case? Might as well pick someone off the street, it’d do you as much good.” He stroked his mustache. Reid wanted to clock him in it. “It’s a waste of time and resources. So no, I won’t do it.”

“We have a strong suspicion--” Morgan said diplomatically.

“No, you don’t. I’ve seen what you have. It wouldn’t hold up to even the ghost of a warrant request. This makes circumstantial evidence look as solid as stone.”

Reid ground his teeth together. “Let me see your Captain,” he gritted out. Morgan shot him a quelling look. Reid persisted.

“He’ll tell you the same thing,” Hyde sneered. “The Las Vegas Metro PD doesn’t want a reputation of bringing in suspects for questioning on no evidence whatsoever. Look,” he perched on the desk in front of where Reid and Morgan were sitting like a patronizing paternal figure, and Reid had had quite enough of those today, “you need our permission to conduct any arrests, and we’re not giving it to you. Why don’t you go back to the Fountainview, have a few drinks to take the edge off, and think real hard about what you’re asking me to do?”

“How did you know I was staying at the Fountainview?” Reid asked softly. The file left at his door. Hyde’s bullish obstructionism. Another piece of the puzzle fell into place.

“Must’ve told me last time you were here,” Hyde said, too-casual.

“I didn’t,” Reid said coolly.

Morgan gave Reid a disbelieving look, a _what exactly are you accusing him of here_ look, and leaned forward, all charm and cajoling. “Look, detective, we know what this looks like. We’re asking for some latitude here, as a personal favor. We just want him out of his comfort zone.”

Hyde studied them both suspiciously. Reid bit down on his lip to keep from letting anything particularly counterproductive slip out. “Okay,” he said at last. “You have twenty-four hours. No more.”

“Thank you,” Morgan said. Reid said nothing. He didn’t exactly storm out of Hyde’s office, but he did push the flimsy, government-issue door open with more force than was strictly necessary.

“What was that?” Morgan hissed when they were back in the bullpen. “First your mom, now you’re accusing a cop?” 

“Like Rossi said, three people knew we were investigating before we got that file,” Reid said.

“It was a police file from 1986! Anyone could’ve accessed it. And no matter who sent us that file, here’s a tip for you: Don’t insult the person you’re asking a favor of by implying that they’re part of the cover-up of a child’s murder!”

Reid bit his lip, impotently furious. “He could’ve just said yes. It’s a common enough practice.”

“Reid, you know how guys like him operate. Play up to their egos, position yourself as the submissive in the conversation. You _know_ how to handle these guys. You’ve got to keep your head.” Morgan said. Reid nodded, chastised but still angry. Both of them paused when Morgan’s phone trilled. “That’ll be Garcia with background on Gary Brendan Michaels,” Morgan told him, and answered.

Later, watching his father pace, sigh, remove his jacket when he became uncomfortable--pretty easy in an interrogation room--Morgan said quietly, “You still think he did it.”

“Of course I do,” Reid said, clipped.

“Even though Gary Michaels fits the profile better.”

So he skipped town and had several precursor offenses. He wasn’t saying that Michaels wasn’t scum, he was just saying--”What would you think if we were _handed_ the perfect suspect on a case right when we started to investigate someone else?”

“I’d say it’s weird, but not definitive that the first suspect is guilty,” Morgan told him gently.

Reid huffed and turned back to watch his father fiddle with his tie. He’d never noticed before that his father had nervous hands. Like him. He’d never realized that he couldn't have inherited his fidgetiness from his mother, who always moved with the deliberation and gravitas of a queen. He exhaled deeply, as ready as he’d ever be to interrogate his father. “Let’s go see how weird,” he said.  
  
  
  
“What am I doing here, Spencer?” William sighed.

“Didn’t the detective tell you? You’re just here to answer some questions,” Reid said, affecting casualness.

“I won’t talk without counsel.”

Continuing from this point was technically illegal. Somehow, Spencer didn’t think that his father was going to be filing a complaint. “You know, when I was trying to remember the facts of this case, something came back to me.” William stayed stubbornly silent. Reid continued, airily, “I remembered you and Mom fighting one night. And the next morning, I remember you in the backyard, at the fire pit. You were burning someone’s bloody clothes.”

He watched carefully; William’s expression flickered, just briefly. _Got you_ , Spencer thought triumphantly. “Whose blood was it?”

“I told you, I’m not talking without counsel,” William said calmly. Reid searched his brow for sweat, his face for tells.

“It’s a simple enough question, dad. You don’t need a lawyer for this one question, do you? Whose blood was it?”

“I’m not stupid, Spencer,” William said, almost kindly. Then-- “I’m proud of you, you know.”

 _Stay cool,_ Reid told himself, but he couldn’t help the startled laugh that sprang out of his throat. “Is that supposed to make me drop this line of investigation? I can’t be bought off that easily.”

“No, it’s the truth,” William said. “Your mother and I--we knew you were extraordinary. You could’ve put those talents to use anywhere. Made a killing in the private sector, gotten all kinds of accolades and praise. But you chose to devote your life to helping others. You’ve--grown up well, Spencer.”

Spencer smiled meanly. “You forgot something,” he said. “I have a son now.”

He felt more than saw his father reel back, the shock and joy and pain and longing splashed across his face. His hands began to shake, the tell that Reid had been looking for, too late, too late. “Spencer,” he rasped out. “I didn’t know--I never thought--I--” He seemed to be struggling between _Congratulations_ and the desire to ask all the questions Spencer’s revelation had probably inspired in him. “What’s his name?” he finally got out.

“Jack,” Spencer said, unsmiling.

“Can I--do you have any pictures?”

That old familiar fury. That urge to hurt, to cut, to wound. “Do you really think,” he said softly, “I would show pictures of my three-year-old son to a man I suspect of molesting a child?”

The look that crossed onto William’s face was indescribable. Spencer reveled in the hot flush of triumph and pushed away the shame that flickered up like a single dying tongue of flame. When William spoke, his voice was raw, as though he were choking back tears. “Spencer,” he said, “I didn’t do this. Please. I didn’t do this.”

At last. A break. Reid leaned forward, victorious and far from benevolent in his victory. “Then tell me who did.”

William took a shaky breath. “His name… his name was…”

“Gary Michaels?” Reid asked, smiling.

William looked up, startled. “How did you know…?”

“That’s what I was supposed to think, right? Gary Michaels, known pervert who disappeared months after Riley died. He’s the perfect suspect.” William opened his mouth to speak, but Reid talked faster--he was good at talking faster than people--”So tell me, dad. How do you know that Gary Michaels killed Riley?”

“Please,” William said, an awful helplessness in his eyes. “Spencer, please.”

Just then, the door swung open. Reid turned, shot a death glare at whoever was interrupting just at the crucial moment of confession--

“Reid,” Rossi said. “You’re going to want to hear this.”  
  
  
  
“The replacement girl, what’s her name--Todd. She called me with the CODIS match,” Gideon said through Rossi’s speakerphone. “California, 2001. Found a skull, a ribcage and most of a femur. State of the body made it impossible to determine COD, but looks like he was beaten pretty nastily.”

“And JJ?” Reid asked quietly.

“We’re checking her into the obstetrics ward now. Listen, she wanted me to tell you not to worry, work the case. There’ll still be a baby when you get back.”

“Thanks,” Rossi said. “Tell her we’re thinking about her.”

“I would, but I think she has enough to be concerned with at the moment.” A commotion--Reid thought he could make out Prentiss’s usually low voice raised in excitement and Garcia’s excitable chatter. “Listen, I gotta go. Let Todd know if you need anything else.” Gideon clicked off as abruptly as ever. Stunned, Reid looked at Morgan and Rossi.

Morgan was studiously avoiding his eyes. Rossi, on the other hand, was looking at him like he’d never seen him before. Right. The interrogation had gotten a little--unprofessional. Reid shifted with discomfort, having come down a little from the high of sparring with his father. “So--he’s dead,” he said.

“He disappeared in 1986,” Morgan said. “That would explain why he never reoffended again.”

“’Beaten with a blunt object,’” Rossi mused, perusing the case files Gideon had emailed over. “Like a bat, maybe.”

Someone had killed Riley Jenkins. Someone had killed Gary Michaels in spectacular fashion. Had figured out--or thought he’d figured out--that Michaels had been responsible for Riley’s death. His mother’s voice: _I never should have said anything._

Bloody clothes in the firepit.

Reid looked up and saw that Morgan and Rossi had arrived at the same theory. 

“Let’s go to California,” Morgan said.  
  
  
  
A fingerprint. California State Police had a fingerprint on file.  
  
  
  
The ride in the SUV back was tense. They’d disagreed at the Inyo County Sheriff’s Station when Reid had insisted on running the print. Now, Morgan steered with one hand and shot looks at Reid in between glances at the road. Reid stared straight ahead, aware of the weight of Morgan’s gaze but determined to be indifferent to it. He’d done nothing wrong. He was taking a stand against vigilantism, against the idea that you could take the law into your own hands without consequences. On any other case, Morgan and Rossi would’ve insisted they get to the bottom of this. “’The truth will set you free,’” Reid had heard Gideon quip once to a local police chief who’d been hesitant to dig deeply into his town’s secrets, even to find a killer. That was the ethos of the BAU. No one got exceptions. Not even team members’ fathers.

Morgan’s words from the station floated into his head. _You’re just determined to nail him for something, aren’t you? It doesn’t even matter what._

But Morgan didn’t understand. Didn’t feel the _injustice_ of a man living twenty-three years unencumbered by the consequences of his actions. Free to abandon his family. Just free. Didn’t understand the way Reid needed the truth to set _him_ free, from his irrational fear that he and his father were just alike right down to the abandonment of their sons, that traveling with the BAU was his way of escaping, that Jack would grow up miserable and old before his time because both his parents were away more often than not. He needed the imposed distance of prison bars to finally shed the specter of William Reid that he wore slung over his shoulders like an albatross.

It was a long, chokingly arid drive back to Las Vegas.  
  
  
  
At the Fountainview, they waited. No one was quite in the mood for playing slots.

It was Morgan who’d formally put in the request, and so it was Morgan who got the call. Reid floated to his feet as he heard Morgan make affirmative noises, wishing desperately that he would throw courtesy to the wind and just tell him, _tell him_ \--

Morgan snapped his phone closed. He looked at Reid, who felt as though he was about to hover off of the floor with his anxiety and anticipation. “We’re going to have to get an arrest warrant,” he said at last.

And like that, the world made sense again. The sense of _wrongness_ that had plagued him since he first saw the Ethan Hayes case file at Quantico lifted. “It was a match?” he breathed.

“Yeah,” Morgan said, “but not with your dad.”

And the world tilted back off its axis.  
  
  
  
After his son had died, Lou Jenkins had had several arrests for battery and public intoxication. He was still in AFIS. Rossi accompanied him into the interview room--Reid wanted to protest, he knew this was only because Rossi and Morgan still thought he was acting irrationally, but what was really irrational was the idea that William Reid had been burning _his neighbor’s_ bloody clothes after he committed murder instead of burning his own after he was an accomplice to the crime--while Lou was sullen and closed-mouth.

Reid almost regretted bringing him in. He’d only killed his son’s murderer, after all. Reid might’ve done the same.

But he had to know. It was an all-consuming drive now, an itch in his brain he would dig through his skull to get out, the pounding question of his father, his father, his father. Distantly, he was aware that this had stopped being about Jack. That should’ve worried him more than it did.

“I drove to his house. I beat him. I killed him. Then I put him in the trunk of my car and drove him across the state line,” Lou intoned.

“That story’s got a lot of gaps,” Rossi said. Lou shrugged.

“Who was with you on the night of the murder?” Reid demanded.

“No one,” Lou said. He met Spencer’s eye but his gaze veered away too soon, skittish. Lie. “I was alone.”

“You’re already in enough trouble here, Lou,” Rossi said. “Don’t make it worse on yourself.”

“Was William Reid with you that night?” Reid pressed on, relentless.

“No.” This time Lou didn’t even look up from where his hands were clenched around the rim of the table.

Spencer leaned forward. “I saw him,” he hissed. “Burning bloody clothes. So try again. Was William Reid with you that night?”

“No,” Lou said steadily.

Rossi shook his head, gestured with a hand for Reid to step back. Frustrated, Reid did as Rossi changed tacks. “How’d you even know you got the right guy?” Rossi asked. “You may be friends with Detective Hyde, but he didn’t have any suspects.”

“He admitted it,” Lou ground out.

“You beat him to death,” Rossi said dryly. “You know how many people have tried to give me false confessions based on mild stress and discomfort?”

“I just knew,” Lou said.

“You’re going to have to do a lot better than that,” Rossi cajoled.

A flash of furious inspiration struck Reid. “How did you know? Father’s intuition?” he said sarcastically. “How come you didn’t _just know_ before Riley was killed--”

“Reid,” Rossi said, alarmed.

Lou slammed his fists down on the table. Reid had trained himself not to flinch at these moments. But he talked. “Another parent told me he’d approached their kid,” he snarled.

Reid’s heartbeat picked up because this was it--this was where the accomplice lived, this was the secret of his father’s past--and then came even faster as he remembered--

_Hew, you’re pretty good. Mind if I play?_

Honey mesquite and desert willow in bloom. The smoothness of the wood pieces under his fingers. The pinch of his glasses on his brow. The buzz of mosquitoes nearby. Gary Michaels, bending down over a chessboard.

“Who was it,” he said numbly.

Lou stayed silent. Reid rounded on him, furious-- “ _Who was it?!”_

The door. Reid spun on his heel, ready to castigate Hyde for interrupting an investigation that was now above his paygrade, for being stupid enough to confuse intimidation tactics with possible brutality, for being _yet another_ person who was sure Reid had lost his head when he _hadn’t_ , he just needed to know, _he needed to know_ \--but before he could he caught sight of the person standing with him. William Reid. And behind him--

“Spencer,” his mother said.  
  
  
  
This was the story Diana Reid told:

“He was… a fixture of the neighborhood. You’d see him at barbecues, block parties. At the park. Do you remember, you used to play chess there?” (A mute nod.) “You’d even play with adults sometimes. But the moment this man sat across from you… I knew. I knew.

(”The maternal animal,” Spencer murmured. Diana nodded at him in that way she’d always had, in her more lucid moments, of a teacher acknowledging a pupil. “Did he… did he ever--touch me?”)

“No. Thank God, no. You only interacted with him the one time. That afternoon, I called Lou. I told him my suspicions. I--I didn’t know he was going to do anything. But two nights later, he called me back. He said he needed to see me. I found him parked outside of Gary Michaels’s house. He wanted me to confirm that that was the man I was talking about. He said he had a history of sex offenses. I never knew how he found that out.” ( _Detective Hyde,_ Reid thought numbly, still putting together puzzle pieces even when this, at last, had shocked the rage out of him.) “He told me to go.

“He… he picked up a bat. And went inside. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Couldn’t call for help. It felt as though I were trapped in that moment. Like a waking dream. Oh…

(”It’s okay, Diana.”)

“Eventually, I followed him in. What I saw… oh, Spencer. It was--a horror scene. I knew--I know what Gary Michaels did. But I was still… repelled. Lou was there, standing over a dead body. And there was blood… oh, so much blood. I slipped in it. Drenched my clothes in it. And that’s all I remember, Spencer. I’m sorry.”  
  
  
  
“You came home,” William Reid continued. “You were disoriented. It took me hours to get the full story out of you. We… we argued. But I understood why you did it.”

Reid cleared his throat shakily. “So the bloody clothes you were burning--”

“—were hers. I couldn’t go to the police. She could’ve been tried as a co-conspirator. We kept the secret, all of us, for decades.”

Reid swallowed. “Is that why you left?”

William nodded slowly. “In a way. The weight of that night… It pulled at us.” He shot a glance at Diana, who was looking at him sharply, inscrutably, so different from the soft, fuzzy-edged, medicated Diana. For a moment, limned by the dimming sun, he looked exactly as Spencer remembered him, the gray in his hair and the lines in his face gone. “It pulled us apart. And the thought… that it could’ve been you. I tried. I swear I tried. But we were never the same afterward.”

All this time, he’d been looking for a monster.

Shame prickled at him. In the cold light of reality, he could see what Morgan and Rossi had been trying to tell him all along: that this had never been about the truth about Riley, but always the truth about his father. About revenge, about old wounds, about a fundamental failure of empathy on his part, an inability to hold in his mind both the thought that his father loved him and the knowledge that he had left him.

The urge to duck his head and mumble an apology to his shoes seized him, but he was braver than he’d been two years ago, and so he tilted his chin up and said to William, “I’m sorry. For everything.”

William smiled at him. For a moment, Spencer saw his own smile in the lines around his eyes. “I forgive you.”

And later, after Diana had stepped back onto an institutional shuttle, before they booked Lou Jenkins, he stood outside under the station’s eaves with just his father and dug in his wallet. The picture he selected called to mind one warm spring day when Aaron hadn't been on assignment but mixing pancakes in the kitchen: Jack, face smeared with batter, scrutinizing himself seriously in the hallway mirror. “Here,” he said, and shoved it at William. He might’ve been braver than he had been before he'd met Aaron, but he still wasn’t brave enough to look his father in the eye, apparently.

A long silence. Then William said, his voice rough and raspy, “Spencer, he’s beautiful.”

Spencer looked over. William’s eyes were fixed on the photo. He was running a finger over Jack’s face, enraptured. Reid approved of this reaction to his child. “He’s three years, one month, and five days old. He likes space and he talks in his sleep.”

William’s fingers tightened on the photo. “Can I--keep this?” he asked hesitantly.

“Yeah.” That was the point, after all. Spencer swallowed, gathered his strength, blurted out, “I’m--I’m married, too. To a man. I’m married to a man.”

“Spencer, that’s wonderful,” William said. He didn’t even skip a beat. “And…” here he hesitated, but he seemed to sense that Spencer, too, was feeling his way across a minefield of sore, raw wounds and recent accusations, “and you. Are you happy?”

“Yeah,” Reid said. “Yeah, Dad, I’m happy.”  
  
  
  
The jet was in Quantico, so they flew back commercial. The scent of stale, recycled airplane air and pretzels. Squashed between Morgan and Rossi, Reid said, “Guys, I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Morgan raised a perfectly-sculpted eyebrow.

“You guys were right. I let my emotions get the better of me and… you were right about my motives, too. I did just want to punish my dad. I’m sorry for not listening to you.”

Rossi had closed his eyes when the plane hit a patch of turbulence earlier, but now he opened them. “Kid, trust me. We’ve all got issues.”

“Speak for yourself,” Morgan said playfully, then, “He’s right, you know. You all good now?”

“Yeah,” Reid said. “Thanks to you guys.”

“Anytime, ki--” the plane jounced once, forcefully, and Rossi swore, “ _Oh Dio_.” His eyes clamped back shut, and he crossed himself with the hand that wasn’t white-knuckling the armrest. Reid suppressed a smile and turned back to Morgan, who quizzed him on Notorious B.I.G. lyrics until they deplaned.

At the hospital, Rossi and Morgan swarmed in to see the baby immediately. Gideon was waiting for Reid outside. Reid paused and prepared to be chewed out--though no punishment could compare to learning that he’d falsely accused his father of pedophilia.

But Gideon just looked him over. “You got what you needed?” he asked eventually, quietly.

“Yeah, I did.”

Gideon nodded. “Good.”  
  
  
  
JJ was sweaty, red-faced, and radiant. Morgan was hunched over the bed, cooing over the squat, pudgy thing in her arms; Will and Rossi hovered nearby. He knocked hesitantly. JJ looked up and smiled at him.

“You look terrible,” she said. “And that’s coming from someone who just went through labor, so I would know.”

“You know you’re beautiful,” Reid retorted. It was true; she’d clearly been cleaned up since the main event. Traces of baby fat still lingered around her face, making her look downright cherubic. “Is this…”

“Henry LaMontagne,” JJ introduced proudly. “17.5 inches, seven pounds and fourteen ounces.” Reid crept over to her bedside and looked into the little face of a fresh human. Henry squinted at him. Reid stared, a little melty, a little awed--he’d met Jack when he was nine months old, he’d never been around something so small.

JJ glanced up. “Can you give us a minute?”

Morgan grumbled but Will successfully ushered them out of the room with promises of tracking down the rest of the team from where they’d scattered for food. Reid eyed her carefully for any sign of the anxiety about being a mother she’d dealt with all throughout her pregnancy and saw only a glowing, fierce peace. And concern, but it was directed at him, not the possibility of change. “Okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” Maybe on another day he’d have confessed to JJ, who was swiftly becoming a good friend, the whole awful truth of what had happened in Las Vegas, but he had the suspicion that she’d been helping on the case solely to take her mind off the incoming baby and no longer needed the distraction anymore. He just smiled at her. “What about you?” 

“Surprisingly calm, all things considered. You were right about what it feels like, your world reorienting.”

“See? Easy. Trust me, it's the little stuff like the potty training and figuring out how many toys lead to a healthy balance between cognitive development and demonstrated restraint that's hard."

JJ laughed. “Spence, listen. There’s something I want to ask you. Would you… do you want to be Henry’s godfather?”

“What,” Reid said. “What? Why me?”

JJ shrugged self-consciously, careful not to dislodge Henry. “I know we haven’t known each other that long, but… you really helped me with all this parenting stuff when I needed it. And I’ve seen you with Jack. I know that if something ever happened to Will and me, you’d make sure Henry grew up great.”

Reid floundered; he felt like the gawky twenty-two-year-old who invariably made every baby in the vicinity cry all over again. This was not what he’d expected when he’d started the day with a neck cramp from sleeping through their flight over Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. “JJ…” he whispered. “Yes. Yes, of course I will.”

She grinned at him. “Great. Hey. Wanna hold him?”

Reid reached out his arms and JJ lowered Henry into them. Reid recalled his time with infant Jack--support the head, make your other arm into a cradle--and lifted him. JJ was saying something about Yale. Reid rocked Henry and saw in his moony face a sense of vicarious peace.  
  
  
  
The entire BAU was taking two full sick days to hover over JJ and the baby, apparently. Reid only left when it was time to pick up Jack from day care. The face of his own son soothed something in him, a knot he hadn’t realized had still been twisted inside of him even since the Michael Bridges case. That night, for the first time in days, which he felt a little guilty about, he waited by the phone. 

The call came in at 8 o’clock, as always, barring undercover-type emergencies. Two rings, then a hang-up. Spencer reached for the house phone and hit redial.

Aaron picked up immediately.

“Hey,” he said, sounding warm and pleased. “Case over?”

“Yeah,” Spencer said, dredging up his memories of distractedly hunting for a missing five-year-old, something that seemed so distant for all that it had happened two days ago, like it had happened to another person entirely. “We found him. Turned out it was a woman with maternal desire stemming from the removal of her own baby by the state.”

Aaron _hmm_ ed. “And she wasn’t abducting newborns? You would think they would be better surrogates.”

“No, her delusional state projected her child onto any that she could get access to.” Spencer picked at the curled phone cord with his finger. “Ah, the case was actually over a couple of days ago. I stayed in Vegas for a few days.”

“How’s Diana?” Aaron asked, sounding pleased. He had no idea about Riley Jenkins or any of it, of course he would’ve assumed that Spencer had been in Vegas to see his mother--Spencer had no doubt that Aaron knew very well how long it had been since Spencer had seen her, and agonized over it--still, Spencer felt another flicker of guilt that his hypothetical, sensible self still hadn’t bothered to call his husband.

“She’s--fine.” Well, she’d gone off her medication and was probably terrorizing the orderlies at this moment as she went back on her regimen. “She’s--”

“Spencer?” Aaron asked, his voice rich with concern.

And the whole story was spilling out, Spencer mildly kicking himself because Aaron was currently undercover rooting out a corrupt police department, he hardly needed anything else to worry about, but the tone of his voice and his crisp consonants over the phone line unlocked something in him, something needy and painful, some wounded animal seeking a primal comfort, and he had to get out the jumbled mess in his brain before it poisoned him any further, had to explain it to the only person who had ever made things clearer in his head. Aaron listened in that way he had where every word he spoke seemed to draw out another five from Spencer. At last he said, “He forgave you, Spencer.”

“I know, I know.” He scrubbed at his face. “I’m just so--embarrassed. Ashamed. I’ve upended all their lives, and for what? Petty revenge.”

“From an investigative standpoint, you didn’t do anything wrong. You let your emotions get the better of you but you never outright ignored and reinterpreted facts. Justice has been done.”

“Has it?” Spencer sighed. “I--I don’t know if I would’ve pursued it if I’d known that Lou Jenkins was the murderer. Now he’s facing decades in prison.”

“If this had been a case, would you have acted any different?” Aaron asked kindly.

“No. But…”

“Because on a case, you know that your highest duty is to the truth. Your team’s, too.”

“I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to face Rossi or Morgan again. And Gideon… he knew from the beginning. You’ve never stepped a toe out of line in your life, but I acted so unprofessionally. My whole messy personal life, laid out for them to see.”

“They told you that they understood. In this case, I think you should take them at face value. It might surprise you to learn,” Aaron said, a hint of humor in his voice, “that I’m not entirely unsympathetic to your personal and professional lives crossing paths.”

Spencer’s first thought was the awful night that had stolen Jack’s mother and Aaron’s heart. His second thought was about falling in love. He smiled. “I guess not,” he said softly.

“They love you, you know. So do I.”

Spencer sniffled. “Did I tell you, JJ had her baby.”

And they spent the night like they always did when Aaron was away and Jack too conked out to speak to his other father, talking and laughing about nothing in particular, about Jack’s latest antics, the cases they were working, Melville versus Hawthorne versus Poe, the latest book Spencer read that he thought Aaron would like, how soon he would be home. “I think I’ve identified the main conspirators,” Aaron said. “Maybe a few more weeks to wrap everything up. Then I think I can come home. And you. How are you doing?” Now that you’ve talked it out, now that some time has passed since the initial trauma of telling, Spencer heard.

“It still bothers me,” he said softly. “It’s like my apology wasn’t enough. There’s something else I need to tell him.”

“Maybe you need to return the favor and forgive him. Maybe that’s the peace you’re searching for.”

Spencer felt himself smile. Put that way, it seemed so simple. “I told him about us, you know,” Spencer said quietly.

“What did he say?”

“He congratulated me. He asked if I were happy.”

He could hear Aaron’s smile over the phone, the faint curve of lip so slight you might miss it if you weren’t studying him for the change. Spencer had a lot of practice studying Aaron. “And what did you say?”

“You know what I said,” Spencer said, and rung off to the sound of Aaron’s quiet, heartfelt laughter in his ear.  
  
  
  
“Daddy, look! Daddy, _look!”_

Jack’s vocabulary had evolved in leaps and bounds over the past year. The development books said that he should be able to understand 75% of his speech; Spencer found it was closer to 90%. They’d gone into the city this Sunday and set up a picnic near the Constitution Gardens. Jack romped uproariously with the ducks, flapping his arms and--until Spencer had hastily seized him and removed him--trying to pick up the cracked corn with his teeth.

He was growing up so quickly, Spencer thought, that old parents’ cliché. He was glad Aaron would be back soon; Jack and Aaron talked nearly every night on their nightly phone calls, and lately they’d even been reading bedtime stories together over the phone, but it still wasn’t the same. Spencer never stopped being grateful for the wonderful gift Aaron had given him besides a life spent together--these moments, being able to see Jack grow and flourish--but there were times he felt it most acutely. 

“Daddy! Ducks is going!” Jack cried out. And they had indeed grown bored with treats, had filed into the water and launched themselves away onto another adventure.

Spencer scooped him up and balanced him on his hip, a maneuver he’d perfected over the years. “The ducks _are_ going,” he said. “Plurals, remember?”

“Are going, are going,” Jack chanted. They had sandwiches and homemade chips on a stone bench nearby. Spencer thought about fathers and love and the little things that made up a life.

That afternoon while Jack was deep in a nap, chasing ducks in his dreams, Spencer finished his daily letter to his mother and hesitated before setting down the pen. He looked at it a minute. Then he picked up a fresh page of paper and wrote,

_Dear Dad,_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Both Riley Jenkins and Aaron Hotchner were, in fact, stabbed nine times in the chest.
> 
> "Memoriam" itself is unsure of the year of Riley's murder; Reid asks for an '84 police file but Michaels was arrested in '85 for a precursor crime. I decided to set it in the year that Reid would've been 4 during the spring/summer.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals."  
> \--Ramsey Clark

ROSSI  
The week after they got back from Las Vegas, Reid went on his first recruitment tour. Rossi, for his sins, was tapped to go with him.

Reid’d mellowed considerably since their return; he was almost able to look Rossi in the eye without blushing again. This assignment, though, seemed destined for disaster. Reid had impressed him with his unexpected skill and coolness under pressure in the past. He was not doing so now.

At one point, he tried to tell a joke about blood splatter analysis. Rossi hastily redirected the topic back to joining the FBI.

“What are you doing,” he hissed at Reid as they wrapped up one disaster at Strayer to make their way to what would undoubtedly be another disaster at Galludet.

Reid’s face was still red as a plum. “This isn’t my strong suit, okay,” he said, which was a bit like saying that skinny-dipping in the Arctic was sort of cold. “Skipping six grades doesn’t exactly make you good at connecting with your peers. Why don’t _you_ just do all the talking? They like you. College students didn’t even like me when I was one of them.”

Ooh, he wasn’t going to get off by aiming his doe-eyes at Rossi and telling a pathetic story, not this time. “You’re a profiler! Just--bluff them into liking you!”

“That’s easy for you to say, I’m not an acclaimed author who spends two full hours after every one of these presentations signing books!” Reid snapped. That, at least in one sense, was an improvement. When he’d first started working with the BAU, he wouldn’t have dreamed of one day using Rossi’s fame and prestige to score cheap points in an argument with him. This whole conversation was a step in the right direction in terms of Reid feeling more at home with the team. It was just also highly annoying.

Rossi knew he ought to be more understanding; it was clear that this was a sore spot for Reid, and no surprise that a kid like him would have bruises instead of callouses when it came to, basically, impressing young people, especially as he was fresh from a confrontation with his own childhood trauma. But something about this wave of recruitment pitches, a task he usually enjoyed or at least faked enjoyment well enough to convince himself most of the time, had knocked something off-kilter in him. Maybe it was the way his writing hadn’t quite sat well with him since their encounter with extreme serial killer fan Chloe Kelcher in Ohio, maybe it was the way he’d stared blankly at the screen of a word processor and been unable to churn the words out, but he felt itchy and overheated and aching to get back to the clean, simple work of profiling monsters.

In the last, tumultuous days of their marriage, Carolyn had snapped, “ _That’s the problem with you, David. You find chasing after shadows simple and everything else complicated. What does that say about you?”_ And maybe she was right. Introspection was difficult when he was standing in the high-roofed hall of a university building and exasperately contemplating three more talks today with a partner even less suited to the task than Rossi felt he himself was.

“Look,” he sighed, “just--tell a few stories about how you decided to work for the Bureau. I’ll do the rest of the talking,” he added magnanimously. “And don’t make it sound like too much work. Young people hate work.”

“Okay--hey,” Reid frowned.

Rossi winked and took a little petty pleasure from how Reid scowled at him. He really was fond of the kid, terrible at picking up Rossi’s slack though he might be.

They were almost down the stairs when a man stopped them. Rossi gave him a disinterested once-over--he was hardly the demographic they were trying to reach--mid-fifties, foppish, fastidious, the kind of man who dressed in all-white unironically. Normally he would’ve slowed, made ingratiating small talk with what was clearly one of his fans, but he really did just want to get the rest of the day over with. But it was Reid the man stopped. “Magnificent,” he was saying. “Truly a magnificent presentation. You must be a terribly effective recruitment tool, Doctor.”

Which was--off, already, because objectively speaking, Reid was a _terrible_ recruitment tool. For all that he just wanted to get out of there and get on with it, Rossi couldn’t help the curiosity that flickered to life. Someone trying to ingratiate themselves with a BAU member? But why pick Reid?

Reid smiled shyly. “Oh, thank you,” he said, sounding a little false. Obviously he, too, knew that something was up. Maybe the man thought that as the newest member of the team, Reid would be the most susceptible to flattery?

Rossi decided that whatever this man’s motives were he didn’t like them, and he cut in, “Yes, thank you--sorry to interrupt, we’ve got another engagement in an hour--”

“Of course, of course, I wouldn’t want to keep you from your task of inspiring young minds,” the man said insipidly. “I was just hoping that you would take a look at something for me--”

Ah. A case. Rossi didn’t roll his eyes, but it was a close thing. A line-jumper hoping to bypass JJ’s--or, well, Jordan’s now--iron-fisted gatekeeping. But Reid, new and naïve, was already reaching for the neat project folder the man was holding out--flattery was a potent weapon, even when the flattery was made up of blatant lies--Rossi reached out to pluck the folder from Reid’s hands but they’d frozen on the photos within. Rossi paused at Reid’s expression, which had gone from confused to slightly horrified. “What--what is this?” he croaked.

“Seven homicide victims,” the man said silkily.

As though the day had needed to get any worse.  
  
  
  
PRENTISS  
Prentiss was bent over a chessboard in Gideon’s office--he’d gained an early lead with some strategic rook action and had taken control of the board, but she thought she saw an opening just L-shaped enough for her knight to squeeze through--when Jordan stormed in and slammed the door. “Has anyone suggested I am unable to do my job?” she snapped.

Gideon looked Jordan up and down and then shouted, “ROSSI,” as per usual when anything administrative and uncomfortable happened in the BAU.

“He’s out with Reid,” Jordan snapped. _“Have they?”_

“Are you all right, Jordan?” Prentiss tried, as much to give Gideon time to regroup from the horror of realizing he was going to have to face an emotional team member on his own as out of genuine concern for her.

Jordan just--straight-up ignored her. “I can do this job,” she said seethingly, more to the room at large than Gideon in particular. “Sir, do you have any complaints about the way I’ve handled myself so far?”

“No,” Gideon said simply, though his eyes seemed to say _not until this moment_.

“And if you did, you’d tell me?”

“Yes…”

Jordan nodded sharply, satisfied, then spun on her heel and stormed back out of the room. Stunned, Prentiss exchanged looks with Gideon, who seemed as flummoxed as she did. At last, he shrugged and moved his bishop.

On this team, you learned quickly, sometimes to love people, you had to let them be. She and Gideon were still studiously not talking about it when the phone rang. Gideon answered it distractedly, still poring over the chessboard. “Yes? Dave?”

His tone changed. “Seven victims?” Prentiss looked up sharply, feeling the sea change in the air that came with a case.

A cloud had drawn over Gideon’s expression. “And what do you think of him?” he asked, and whatever Rossi said caused Gideon’s forceful gaze to lock onto Prentiss. Without saying goodbye, he hung up--Gideon and Rossi were used to each other’s peculiarities by now--and he said, grave as a funeral, “Get Morgan. There may be five people who need our help.”

Prentiss found Morgan spinning at his desk chair and pointedly not writing a report about last week’s child abduction. She briefed him--as much as she could, given the circumstances--and then found herself asking, “Hey, what’s up with Jordan?”

Morgan grimaced. Jordan and Morgan had some kind of weird preexisting relationship somehow involving bad coffee and a brownie--she hadn’t asked for details, the less she knew about Morgan’s sordid personal affairs, the better. “I think I know,” he said, resigned, which was man-code for _I think it’s my fault._ She shot him her best _fix it_ look and he nodded wearily. It was great how well they understood one another, even without words.

They were ascending the stairs to Gideon’s office for more details when the TV, which was always set to the local news, flashed yellow with a breaking news alert. Out of habit, Prentiss paused; breaking news meant a 50-50 chance that the BAU was going to be very busy with something very soon. The report was about a day care--

Oh no.

A daycare whose caretaker and four children had been snatched right out of her home.

Morgan had come to a complete stop on the steps above her; he was staring at the broadcast now, too. His expression had gone granite. Kids were hard on everyone, but Morgan and now, it turned out, Reid, more than most--and both of them had excellent reasons why. Prentiss’s eyes flickered up to where Gideon was emerging from his office--surely whatever Rossi and Reid had found, this had to take priority--but Gideon’s attention turned to the news with no change in his expression at all. Oh, this was bad, wasn’t it.

Prentiss’s first glimpse of the man was at the elevator bank; movement caught her eye and she glanced over just in time to see Reid, Rossi, two security guards, and the man unsquash themselves and tumble out. He was wearing a white suit like he thought that made him interesting-looking, open collar, long hair, neatly kept. The guards carried him on to the sixth floor interrogation rooms and out of sight, but Reid and Rossi detoured into the bullpen, where everyone except Prentiss now had their eyes glued to the screen.

Everyone except Prentiss and Gideon, who looked over at them and said in that matter-of-fact way of his that still portended doom, “You said there were five more victims we could save?”

Reid had a different take on the situation: later, looking in on the man as he stewed, he lamented, “Why don’t I ever get any normal fans?”

Prentiss remembered Nathan Lane, who’d kept obsessive notes over the lecture series Reid and Morgan had delivered together at Georgetown to Masters’ students about obsessional crimes, and concurred.  
  
  
  
ROSSI  
In a rare flash of temper, Reid protested when Rossi announced that he was going to have no part of the interrogation.

“I think I’ve proven that I can handle an interrogation on my own by now,” he said loudly, and he colored, but he didn’t take it back.

Rossi just said impatiently, “We are not giving that creep what he wants,” and swirled off. Jason found him staring through the mirrored glass at this man who thought that the lives of four children and an innocent women were game pieces, this egotistical windbag who wanted to play Hannibal Lecter.

“You were a little hard on him back there,” he said mildly.

Rossi scowled. “Come on, Jason, you know what we’ve gotta do here. With a narcissist like this, if you give an inch they’ll take a mile; we’ve got to demonstrate firmly that he’s not in control, throw a wrench in his plan. He wants to play with Reid? We send in anyone but Reid.”

“I know that,” Gideon said, tone not changing a whit. “I just wonder if you have your own reasons for wanting to be the one to interrogate him.”

Rossi wondered if Reid had told him about the way the man had needled Rossi in the car, belittled him, talked down to him, ignored him and focused only on Reid. All right, so he wanted to be the one in particular to beat this bastard; it would be a delicious kind of irony. It didn’t mean he wasn’t right.

“I just want to get to the bottom of this,” he said. It wasn’t personal.  
  
  
  
Of course, he turned out to be very wrong.

Speaking to the man was like banging his head against a wall. Gideon might say that interrogation was the most dynamic form of profiling, but Gideon was pacing the conference room with Reid and Prentiss, reverse-profiling the identities of the victims based on what they knew of their killer. The man spoke languidly, drawing down the minutes until their next deadline, when another hostage would die, and he never spoke about the murders or where he was holding Kaylee and the children: he talked about long-debunked genetic theories of murder and the futility of the human condition. Rossi had used Prentiss to startle him, uncover a vital clue about his abduction method, but he’d stalled out there.

And he hated the way the man’s lips shaped the word _David,_ which had nothing to do with how willing he was to use Reid’s title.

“You’ve seen so many killers, David,” the man pronounced at one point during their long, tedious conversation. “What have they taught you about humanity?”

“Nothing,” Rossi said flatly. “The people I hunt, the people I study, the people I write about are outliers. One in a million. They’re not the people I learn from.”

The man affected curiosity. “Oh?”

“The victims--the people just living their lives--they’re the ones who teach me about humanity. But men like you,” he said, “you’re barely human at all.”

For the first time, he saw a flash of real emotion in those pale eyes, like shallow depths, the explosive anger of injured narcissistic ego. Bingo. He was getting somewhere now. “So easy for you. I supposed I’m not surprised. Like I said, I’ve read your books. You’re so eager to distance yourself from the people you write about. You almost fade into the background of your books, one might forget they’re being narrated by a person at all. But you can never erase yourself from the story, David. Not completely.”

Rossi leaned in. “Did I hit a nerve? I’m so sorry. Next time, I’ll be more considerate of your _feelings_. But I have to wonder--”

But he didn’t get the chance to press any further. Reid flung open the door, strode over to the man, and ripped his pendant off in one neat motion. He looked down at it for a second then said, triumphant, “I know how to find them.” And Rossi had no choice but to wander off after him, the white fire of Reid’s genius burning in the air.

Reid unveiled for them a neatly stylized geographical pattern of kills, including the likely location of Kaylee and the children. Rossi had to admire the way he’d pulled it together, spun connections out of thin air and the patchy guesswork the rest of the team had been doing with the original seven victims. But there was still something…

He looked around at the team slipping on their tactical vests. The five of them, determined and unstoppable as a meteor, the best people on earth for what they were doing. And he felt old.

The five of them.

They were already half in the elevator. He ran. He stopped Jason just as he was about to turn into the elevator. “Don’t go into the house,” he panted.

“What?” Morgan said, eyeing the way Rossi was panting after having sprinted down the hall to catch them in time.

“The five of you. I think it’s a trap. _That’s_ why he came to me and Reid today, that’s why he was so deliberate about his clues, about his desire for us to save Kaylee and the kids. If he really wanted to present a masterpiece to the world, why not kill the five of them and then come forward? Why give us a chance to save them, why risk that we would leave the work unfinished? Unless sending five federal agents there is exactly what he wants. _The five of you._ The final massacre.”

“And the kids?” Prentiss asked.

“I think they’re still alive. Think about it. If _you’re_ the intended victims, he won’t kill ten people today, it throws off his pattern. The next Fibonacci number is 8, right, Reid?” Reid nodded. “The whole thing has been staged from the beginning. I think these deadlines are, too--all in order to get you there in such a hurry that you don’t make sure the place is clear before you go in.”

Gideon looked grim. “And if you’re wrong, we may not have enough time before the next hostage dies.”

Rossi closed his eyes. “I know. I know. Jason, please, trust me. Please trust me on this.”

Jason pierced him through with his eyes. Slowly, slowly, he nodded.  
  
  
  
Rossi closed the door to the interrogation room behind him. He lingered in the feeling of hard steel against his back; it braced him, gave him strength. The man looked up at him, a tiny smile playing around his lips. For the first time today he felt alive, the cool electric sparking down his spine that heralded a _good_ interrogation, a dance of minds he could win.

Time to bait the fish. “Chester, Virginia,” he said.

The man turned his lips down. “What,” he said, sounding startled and annoyed. Rossi could hear the falseness in it.

“We found your hideout. The team’s going in now. They’ll free Kaylee and the kids long before four o’clock. You lose.”

“Do I,” the man said, tapping his fingers against his lips in the rhythm Reid had noticed, which Rossi could now parse out as well now that he knew what he was looking for: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5…

“Pretty far to go for an obsession with some numbers,” he said. Deliberately dismissed the complexity of it. Play into his view of you as an idiot, as a rough-and-ready thug. “Why do it? Why resort to murder?”

“Phi is more than ‘some numbers,’ David. It is… perfection.”

“And that’s why you killed those women. Because they were perfect.”

“ _If,”_ he said silkily, doing the Bundy thing, skillfully talking around the fact that _he_ had committed the murders, “I had killed those women, it would’ve been because they were perfect exemplars of humanity.”

Rossi scoffed. “You kill because you hate humanity?”

“As much as you do, David,” the man said. There was a new light in his eyes, a fevered glint that told Rossi he was getting close, that they were at last getting to the _why_ of it all.

“I don’t hate humanity.”

“I’ve read your books, David. I know the truth. It’s in there, in all of them, if you know where to look.” Rossi tipped his chin up, gave him a challenging look. “You don’t believe me? _Eyes of a Predator,_ page 89. ‘The first time I saw one of William Grace's victims, I knew I was looking at the residue of pure evil. I would never again feel completely safe around a human being.’ _Broken Child,_ page 271. ‘It strikes me over and over again in the course of my work what depravity man is capable of, what depravity we may all be capable of when pushed to extremes.’ _Deviance,_ page 114. ‘I think that for some people, only death is perfect justice for the horror and pain they have meted out during their lives.’ Perfect justice, David. How poetic.”

Something was alight in the man, something that had been missing when he’d been playing with Reid, something that had been missing throughout Rossi’s tireless efforts at interrogation so far. He’d memorized his books. Coming from anyone except Reid, that was a red flag the size of Canada. “This is about my books?”

“You are as bloodthirsty as any of the monsters you hunt, David. You have just cloaked it in a veil that shields you from the consequences. But no longer.”

This. This was it. A motive. “What do you mean?”

“Your dear friends will never leave that house alive, David,” he crooned, and Rossi felt victory thrill in his heart.

He stood, as if agitated. Called over his shoulder, “Garcia, get Gideon on the line!”

“It’s too late. Your team, your precious five, have already completed my sequence. Perfect justice, David. _Frenzy,_ page 112. ‘The BAU is more of a family than any I’ve ever had or will have.’ You take away my family,” he said silkily, “I take away yours.”

Garcia clicked onto the speaker. “Gideon isn’t answering.”

“Get Morgan, or Prentiss,” he said, let urgency infuse his voice as he stood and paced. “You’ve got to get them out of there, it’s a trap!”

“It’s too late,” the man crowed. “It’s too late.”

Rossi slumped at the table. “Why? What did I do to you?”

“My brother,” he said. “William Grace.” And at last--at last--it all clicked into place.

Henry. Henry Grace. Rossi remembered--

It had been years ago, one of his very first cases--and the years had transformed the man in front of him--but those eyes, he’d seen those eyes before, he’d met those eyes across a courtroom and seen how they’d burned with hatred, but he was used to that, used to the denials of family members and friends, used to the vitriol aimed at him for his role in locking away--and sometimes executing--the damned. He’d never thought he’d see him again like this. Or that seven innocent women--and almost his team--would have paid the price. He made a soft, wounded noise that was only half-faked. Whatever Grace believed about his attitude towards humanity, pity rose up in him like the tide.

This wasn’t Rossi's fault. It wasn’t. Henry Grace had made a series of choices of his own free will. But still he shuddered as Grace spat out, “You _used_ him like a sideshow attraction. You stood there watching over his body at the execution, and then wrote about him like his story was yours, like you had more right to him than the people who loved him. Than his own brother. Whenever people talked about William Grace, they talked about _you_. You got fat and rich off of the spectacle of my brother’s death. So when I began my new life, when I realized that my brother had never been alone in his _pure evil,_ I knew how this would end. I read your books, looking to understand the man who had killed my brother, and I realized that you were just like me. Just like him. We were all seeking _perfect justice._ And at last, I have it.”

He wrenched his mind back to the confession he was getting. So close. He was so close. He said, “You killed those people… because of me.”

“That’s right,” Grace said. Just a little further… “I killed twelve people… because of you.”

There.

Rossi rose, his face falling back into a cool mask. He rapped on the two-way glass. “Garcia, you get all that?” he called back.

“Every word, boss,” she chirped from over the intercom.

“Good work, Dave,” crackled in Gideon from where she’d three-wayed him in. He would relish the way Henry Grace froze in his chair for the rest of his life.

“Kaylee and the kids?” he asked, just to be sure.

“All safe. Morgan and Jordan are taking them back to Loretto.”

“And the team?”

He could hear Jason almost-smiling down the line. “We’re all fine, too. We’ll see you back at the office, Dave.”

“What--how--” Grace sputtered.

Rossi turned, hard triumph lighting up his eyes. “Oh, I figured out your little scheme before they left. I was bluffing to get a confession. It turns out you’re just as predictable and sloppy as your brother. You weren’t a challenge at all.”

Rossi could see the rage boil over in Grace’s eyes but he stood there, frozen, too afraid to rush him head-on. He would wait. Like he did with the women, he would strike like a coward from the shadows. But unlike his victims, Rossi was ready for him. He pointedly turned his back on Grace and headed for the door, eager to teach him one last lesson about how pathetic he really was.

Twisting Grace's arm around his back when he rushed him was a sweeter end to the day than any number of fine champagnes.  
  
  
  
He was processing Grace when the team got back from their rescue mission. Watching them file out of the elevator, taking vests and windbreakers off, chatting heartily--or more probably gossiping, he’d worked with profilers for too long not to know the score--he fought back the feeling that someone had just walked over his grave. Years ago, he’d meant that line about his family as a kind of self-deprecating dig about the despair of his personal life: fresh off the third divorce, bitterly swearing off not just marriage but all women (a promise he'd managed to keep for a little less than a month), writing about glory years that he’d been sure were long behind him. _The BAU is more of a family than any I’ve ever had or will have._ The obsessed workaholics he shared desk space with and sometimes went without speaking to for months at a time if they were all working separate cases. His friends, but not too close of friends--might damage his ambition or his lone-wolf persona. Except for Jason, of course.

And now he was shocked to find that he meant it, not sarcastically, not self-deprecatingly. The BAU of now, the BAU that worked every case together and ate together and drank crappy coffee together and mourned together and fought for each other was closer to growing up in a large Italian American household with children overflowing from every floor than he’d ever though he’d get after James and Carolyn. What he felt was not just camraderie, but something terribly possessive and parental; they were _his_ team, he’d seen them grow and even in a few cases even coaxed them into gorgeous, riotous bloom. And they’d almost died because of him today.

Henry Grace had no idea how close he had been to the truth of his weakness, striking now instead of years ago, before his retirement. It wasn’t his fault. Henry Grace had made his choice, and that had nothing to do with Rossi. It was easier to say than to believe.

Which reminded him.

Rossi found Reid erasing the evidence board in the conference room. He leaned against the doorjamb and just watched him for a minute. Then he said, “It wasn’t about you.”

Startled, Reid fumbled the eraser. Rossi bit back a smile. “P-pardon?”

“The interrogation. It had nothing to do with your readiness or experience. We wanted to catch him off-guard, push back at his demands. Of course, what he really wanted was to needle me, but we didn’t know that at the time.”

Reid flushed and ran a hand through his hair. “I know. I, I’m sorry. I just… feel like I have to prove myself. Especially after…”

Rossi softened. “Kid,” he said, “you have nothing to prove. Nothing at all.” He paused on his way out the door. “Next time we have a suspect in for questioning, you can take point,” he offered.

Reid smiled wryly. “I think Gideon would have a thing or two to say about that.”

Rossi tapped his nose and winked. He walked out of the BAU with a strange lightness in his heart. In the car, he thought that he’d never written much of the BAU into his books, preferring to keep his coworkers’ privacy--and, he admitted to himself, now that he was old and it was the time for self-reflection, to keep himself in the spotlight--in a way he hadn’t been able to keep that of the victims’ or the killers’ families’. But for the first time in weeks, he itched to put his fingers on a keyboard. The irresistible urge to write, to get his thoughts out, revolved for once around the desire to tell stories about the wonderful, bright, brilliant people he worked with instead of a way to work through the gruesome horror of his everyday world. He drove back home with the pendulum swinging between the ache to write down his… all right, he could admit it, friends, and a paranoid urge to never expose them that way, to protect them from the likes of Henry Grace. Between admiration for his colleagues and a gnawing disgust at his ever-deepening, ever-more-obvious weakness for these fool strays he had somehow taken home.  
  
  
  
MORGAN  
In Atlanta, Jordan lied to a family member and it blew up in her face.

Rossi was sympathetic; it wasn’t like he’d never done shady things for access to a grieving family before, after all. You win some, you get caught in a lie and thrown summarily out of the house some. Gideon… was not.

“You need to think about your place on this team and whether you can operate with the minimum of honesty and skill we demand from our media liaison during the time you’re with us,” he pronounced. Jordan wasn’t quite in tears after that dressing down, but it was close. Morgan hesitated between staying and following when she slipped out; Prentiss shot him a dark look and followed her out herself. Right. Smart. His relationship with Jordan was strained with sexual tension at the best of times. Better to let Prentiss empathize her into submission. She and Jordan had become fast friends in JJ’s absence out of some kind of only-women-on-the-team solidarity. 

That left Morgan with Reid as they hit the clubs that evening with one eye open for anyone trying out “Viper’s” handy little tricks and schemes. Reid looked hilariously uncomfortable in his sweater-vest and button-down, though he had at least tried to fit in by mussing his hair semi-artfully. Morgan grinned and set about his favorite pastime: needling Reid about his love life.

“What about him?” Morgan used his (virgin, of course) drink to gesture at a strapping blond man hovering alone by the bar.

Reid scowled. “Morgan! We’re on the job.”

“You know better than I do how statistically impossible it would be for us to catch him by canvassing the bars given our manpower.”

“Given the average patronage of this area, twenty thousand to one,” Reid muttered.

“See? Tonight, my job is to chat up beautiful women about the serial killer in their midst _and_ to get you laid. I can multitask.”

Reid frowned but cast a furtive glimpse at the blond anyway. “No,” he said after a moment, “too muscley. And I am not doing this with you, Morgan.”

“Mm, so we’re looking for someone sensitive-looking,” Morgan crowed. Reid colored, which told him he’d got it in one. “Okay, okay, I can work with that.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Reid groaned, but he was at last smiling just a bit, loosening up into the spirit of Morgan’s teasing. “I do just fine for myself, you know.”

“So you say, but you never let me meet these mysterious men of yours,” Morgan purred.

“I wonder why,” Reid said under his breath.

Morgan magnanimously decided to pretend that he hadn’t heard him. “What about him? Redhead in the corner. He looks sensitive, like he’d read you his slam poetry in bed afterwards.” Reid shook his head mutely. “Come on, kid, there’s gotta be someone in here who whets your whistle. Hmmm… you like women, too? It’s easier with women. More likely to be into you back than guys.”

“I…” Reid colored. “Yes. Women too. I’m not good with women, though.”

 _And you are with men?_ Morgan wanted to inquire incredulously, but he swallowed it down because, firstly, it was mean, and secondly, by all accounts Reid did do well enough for himself. Morgan scanned the room for someone who looked into weirdness enough that she wouldn’t be turned off by the Reid Experience. The platinum blonde with the flamingo purse, the girl with her hair in chunky braids… the bartender. Perfect. The natural charisma of bartenders would be bound to cancel out whatever awkwardness Reid brought with him like a miasma. He shoved the stack of sketches into Reid’s hands and pushed him in that direction. Reid went with a poisonous glare and a pale flush on his cheeks. Morgan watched indulgently as he actually seemed to impress her with whatever was coming out of his mouth--hopefully not statistics.

Prentiss came up behind him, tugging at the strap of the dress she’d borrowed from one of the uniformed officers--you didn’t exactly pack clubbing clothes in your go-bag. “Ugh,” she said, “that guy is the emperor of sleazebags. If I ever catch a whiff of that hairspray again it’ll be too soon.”

Morgan grinned at her. She looked downright handsome with her hair loose and curled in that dark dress, like something right out of a Gothic novel. “Did you get anything new from him, at least?”

“No,” she sighed. “I’ve got a few more of his tactics to get out on the wire, but that’s it. What about you, any luck?”

“Reid’s over there hopefully getting lucky--” Morgan inclined his chin and Prentiss laugh-snorted, “but no. Struck out.”

“I guess it’ll be up to the press conference,” Prentiss sighed. Rossi was supposed to be speaking to the press right now, in time to make the evening news, giving them their profile and a rough description and all but begging for any information. She tapped her fingers nervously. Morgan glanced over; she looked far away.

“You all right?” he probed gently.

Prentiss startled. “Yeah. Just… thinking about Elle.”

Thinking about the fun she would’ve had tearing into that guy or the way she would’ve illegally shot someone by now, Morgan didn’t ask. It would be December in a few days, and Reid had joined them in January. Still, the loss of a colleague--of a friend--under traumatic circumstances was a wound that lingered, Morgan knew. But then Reid was back, and later they were frantically trying to track down the bartender after she’d called in an S.O.S., and then they were booking and processing Robert Parker and figuring out what to do with his dying mother. He didn’t think of it until much later, sprawled against a window on the plane, listening to something with a snapping beat warble through his headphones, that he missed her too.  
  
  
  
Dead cops, like dead kids, were hard. Two years ago, Rick Ware died in his arms. Twenty-one years before that, it was his father. So Phoenix was a shitshow from start to finish, and he didn’t have time for maudlin thoughts about colleagues long gone because it seemed like every night they lost someone else, at every turn was another bereaved kid Morgan identified too closely with. Jordan redeemed herself, bullying the Phoenix PD into letting them stay on even after they were sure they’d caught the killer, making the press dance to her strings when they staged a takeover of the investigation to lure the unsub out. Morgan was proud of her. But one thought was always with the children.

He had to struggle not to force Reid to stay back while they sallied into the unsub’s traps. He couldn’t bear the thought of Jack, sweet, inquisitive Jack, joining the ranks of the children left behind. Like the Cunninghams. Like the Wares. Like the Morgans. But Reid came with them, pistol out and prepared, ready to back up Gideon with his life. They’d all signed up for this. It was just… it seemed unfair to Morgan that their children hadn’t.

They caught the bastard when he tried to corner Gideon in a dark corner of the station’s parking lot. Morgan took a perverse pleasure in slamming him hard against the door of the SUV. “Not today,” he hissed in his ear. “Not this time.”

They had him in custody for all of two minutes before the bereaved brother of one of his first victims, a gangbanger, leapt out and fatally shot him. Morgan couldn’t help but feel it was a fitting end for the man had who thought of himself as a big-game hunter and, in true poacher fashion, had made everyone else suffer for his ego.

The rest of the team was on the flight back early the next morning. Morgan had asked if he could stay. It wasn’t over for him. Gideon barely gave him his trademark searching look before nodding. It was hardly the first time one of them had made a connection with a victim’s family that stung too fiercely, burned too long.

Profilers didn’t pack evening wear, but they did always travel with a plain black suit. Before they played “Amazing Grace” Morgan found the Cunninghams, said the most reassuring words he could think of to the little blond boy fidgeting uncomfortably in his child-sized mourning suit, and stood back and melted into the ranks of the uniformed officers to watch them lower their killer’s sixth--and final, but that reassurance was too little, too late--victim into the ground. He had nowhere else to be until his commercial flight back to DC late in the afternoon, so he lingered, after the chairs were folded up and put away, long after the officers had dispersed for afternoon shift change, long after he’d finished paying his respects. He looked at Officer Mark Cunningham’s fresh grave and thought, at last, about Elle again.

She’d lost her father the same way. They’d never talked about it; she’d mentioned it once after the Groton case two years ago, when he’d been raw over the particulars of Ware’s death, the sheer senselessness of it all, an overzealous home defender shooting a working cop because of their profile of a black man and his own prejudices. But he kept his pain well-bottled, and so had she. They’d never needed to say anything more about it.

Now, he wished they had. Because his clearest memory of her was the shadow of herself she’d faded into after she’d been shot, after he’d failed to protect her, because he’d spent months repressing the hell out of her absence and throwing himself into the contours of this new team, immersing himself in Reid’s quirks and mysteries and eccentric needs. Because she was one of the only people he’d met who might’ve understood this, his desire to stand and stand and watch and watch for nothing at all, for no reason at all. To simply bear witness to this intimate, familiar pain as it snaked through the lives of another family, another child.

He missed her, he thought, and then let that thought go to twirl among the last-day-of-November breeze. He let Elle go to stand among the other memories of the people he’d lost in one way or another. He let it go.

A soft scuffing behind him.

“Service is over,” said Jordan. He turned, surprised. She was dressed in an austere black dress with just a hint of white lace at the neckline. Her heels would scuff in the grass.

He hadn’t seen her there, watching the ceremony, watching him.

“I didn’t know you stayed,” he said. Surely there was more than enough work for her at Quantico; JJ always seemed run off her feet, and it’d be even worse for a temp.

“I didn’t want you to go alone,” she said simply. Morgan surveyed her large dark eyes, the slight smile she wore which matched the somber mood but had a hint of playful challenge in it as well, the way she always smiled at him. She didn’t ask why he stayed. She just offered her hand.

Morgan took it and they stood there, keeping watch, her small hand in his, her pulse against his skin, like a dirge, like a song.  
  
  
  
JJ  
By the time JJ had Reid and Jack around for a parent playdate, she was going out of her head with boredom.

Henry was--wonderful. Henry was everything she didn’t know she’d needed in her life, a balm to all the rough patches in her soul, to the scraped-raw parts where Ros lived and the deep pit of her trust issues. Her whole world had narrowed in on this little creature of pudge and fuzz and what she had to do to protect him. She loved Henry, totally and completely, in a way she’d never realized she could love anything: headlong, no regrets, no doubts.

But the day-to-day rigmarole of waking every two hours to feed or burp or change or just hold, the exhaustion that dogged her constantly, Will, a newly permanent presence in what had been _her_ space hovering over her shoulder at all hours of the day… it bored her to tears. She found herself missing work, the rush of it, the way every day was different but equally urgent, equally necessary. She missed the way she was somewhere new twice a month now that she’d been all but confined to dinky army base-town Quantico with a baby and a live-in partner that sometimes she still didn’t know how to handle. She missed her friends. Oh, they’d all come to visit, cooing at all the right moments and lying about how she looked, but it wasn’t the same as falling asleep on Morgan’s shoulder on the plane or laughing at Rossi’s fussiness in his cavernous rich-man kitchen. She hoped Jordan was fitting in well, but not too well. Apparently, at least one of her team members had taken it upon himself to welcome her aboard. She and Prentiss had had a good eye-roll over that.

And then there was Will. They were apartment-hunting--couldn’t live with the crib crammed in the corner of the sitting room forever--but while they looked boxes of his things lay everywhere. He’d been snapped up by Metro PD, and part of JJ still boggled at that. New Orleans had been such a part of his soul, she could hear his love for it dripping from his voice like sweet honey every time he spoke to her about his work. But for now he was taking paternity leave of a sort, waiting for JJ to go back to work before he got to business too, which meant he was constantly underfoot trying to help with the baby. And it was irrational, she knew it was irrational, but a small part of her couldn’t help but scream every time Will reached out to hold him, to comfort him, that Henry was _hers_ , that he belonged to her completely in a way Will could never understand or hope to compete with, that she had lived with him and nurtured him and carried him for nine months and he was _her_ child first and foremost. Will noticed, of course. He was a good detective. They argued about it sometimes. They argued about everything sometimes. Having a baby in the house was good for the soul, bad for the stress levels and overall domestic harmony.

“JJ, you gotta start trusting me some time,” Will told her often. And she knew he was right. Of course he was right. The most annoying thing about Will was how often he was right about these things. It just… didn’t have to be today.

So Spence’s visit was a breath of fresh air. He and Jack picked their way around the boxes, which Jack seemed to think was a grand adventure and Reid graciously didn’t comment on, and each of them hugged her so sweetly she thought she thought she might cry. Then Jack leaned up on his tiptoes to peer into the crib, where Henry was gurning at a purple pacifer. He spent a good twenty minutes, a glass of orange juice, and several horror stories about Morgan’s driving just staring. Finally, amused, Reid asked what he thought.

“He’s real squish,” he announced, trying to whisper like the noise might startle Henry although, in the way of kids, he wasn’t very good at it. “Do people get less squishy when they grow up?”

“Well, believe it or not, you used to be even squishier than Henry, since you weighed a full pound more when you were born,” Spence said. Jack made a suspicious face at him. JJ stifled laughter with her napkin. “But people do lose the chubbiness in their faces and bodies as they get older. It’s called brown adipose tissue, colloquially known as baby fat.”

Jack wrinkled his noise. “I don’t have that. Baby fat.”

“Well, then, buddy, why does grandma always pinch your cheeks whenever you visit her?” Reid countered, a smile playing around his lips. Defeated, Jack pouted and turned back to the fascinating pastime of staring at Henry.

“The whole team misses you, you know,” Reid said when she topped up his orange juice. “Jordan’s good, but it’s just not the same.”

JJ’s ego preened at the praise. “I’ll be back soon enough,” she said ruefully. “I love Henry, and I--I love Will, but I also love the BAU. Changing diapers is only so intellectually stimulating.”

“I can attest to that. I think the day Jack was potty-trained might have been the happiest of my life.” JJ laughed as she fetched a bottle for Henry. Might as well not leave him out. Spencer observed curiously. “What’s it like to breast-feed? I’ve always wondered.”

JJ paused. Patted Reid’s cheek. “You’re lucky you’re cute,” she said, and cheerfully ignored the question.

She let both Jack and Reid hold Henry before sending them on their way, Reid supporting Jack’s arms with his own gentle grip as the boys stared at each other and some baby-understanding passed between them. Later that night, she leaned back into the kiss Will placed on the nape of her neck and reflected that Spence hadn’t even commented on the fact that she hadn’t used conditioner in a month. It had been a good day.  
  
  
  
GIDEON  
In between flying to Orange County to solve a case of road rage taken to a new, deadly extreme and consulting on the massacre of four teenagers in Las Vegas, New Mexico, Reid and Gideon played chess.

Reid was diverting to play against because he was eager, hungry for improvement, and new. Gideon and Dave knew each other so well that their chess games revolved around the chat more than the board, both of them conducting their rooks and knights almost blindly in a symphony where each man knew his part. Prentiss was wily, slippery, but he’d played against her for years and knew her inside and out by now. Reid, however, played like he had opened several chess manuals and swallowed dollops of traditional strategy whole, but had never played against someone like Gideon, who played chess like it was poker, who played the opponent as much as he played the pieces on the board. Gideon took pleasure in coaxing and pruning Reid’s talent over chess as much as he did over cases, and Reid seemed to enjoy it as well, if his eagerness to throw his things down and see if he could best Gideon _this_ time, just this time, was any indication.

And they talked. About Gideon’s long experience as a profiler, about cases they were working, about the milestones Reid had yet to hit and what to expect. It was on a chill January evening, one of those nights when the bullpen was slowly clearing of profilers and Reid didn’t seem to worry about getting home, that Reid brought up families. Why no one else seemed to have one.

Gideon paused. Reid, seeming to realize he’d hit a raw spot, tried to backpedal furiously. “I didn’t mean--”

“No,” Gideon said. “It’s natural to be curious. A young father, working with people older than him… and none of them with families of their own.” He let his gaze drift to the photographs marching across the bureau on the other side of the room. “You know, Garcia once asked me if those were pictures of my family.”

“What did you say?” Reid asked, hushed.

“I said yes, sort of.” Gideon chuckled. “Prentiss, Morgan, Garcia--they’re young. Settling down early doesn’t happen so often anymore. Dave and I--we’ve each tried, in different ways. I used to be married, myself. I have a son, Stephen.”

Reid ventured, “What happened?”

“Oh, you know, the usual. The hours, the distance. The serial killers.” Gideon moved his knight to box in Reid’s queen. “In the end, I think I was relieved when Mary left. From a distance, I could imagine they were safe. Up close, each and every horror seemed to superimpose itself on the people I loved.”

“Have you… talked to them?”

“Mary, no. Stephen… I called him a few years ago. It didn’t take.”

Reid was quiet for the space of two moves, an unprecedented event. “I’m sorry, Gideon,” he said, without taking his eyes off the chessboard.

“It’s not for everyone,” Gideon said, answering the question Reid had been dancing around all game. “Sometimes people think they understand what they’re getting into, beginning a relationship with a profiler, but they rarely do. And the endlessness of it… it can wear away even the strongest devotion, even the purest intentions. This team skews young, but divorce isn’t uncommon in the BAU. Of the five founding members of the BAU, only one emerged with a happy marriage.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” Reid asked, a studied blankness on his face.

“That it’s hard,” Gideon said kindly.

“I know that,” Reid said, staring at the chessboard. 

“But not impossible.” Reid looked up at last. Gideon surveyed this young, lanky man who had, not twenty minutes ago, confided in him about a particularly nasty nightmare, this boy who came to him for comfort and for guidance, his friend and protégé, and felt a smile curve his lips. It wasn’t a sad smile. It deeper than that, and sadder. In the BAU, you gave and you lost, and that was life. And sometimes, you got something in return.

“Remember that,” he said, and Reid nodded slowly, his fingers moving a king by muscle memory, his eyes somewhere far away, that place he went home to on nights like these, when someone else was caring for Jack and someone else was tying his tie for him in the mornings. Gideon burned with happiness for him with the force of a small sun.  
  
  
  
PRENTISS  
Florida again. Ugh.

She’d never say it out loud--she knew how important interagency respect and communication was to the proper functioning of the BAU, probably even more than her colleagues, given that it was her JJ turned to, exhausted, after smoothing over particularly rough patches with local authorities somewhere--but Floridian detectives seemed to her a particularly hardheaded breed, determined to push the BAU into a little box of “intellectuals, to be consulted but not obeyed.” With a fourth girl’s life at stake, Detective Linden jumped the gun and arrested their suspect before they knew where his secondary location was. Prentiss settled in for a long conversation with William Harris’s daughter, her fingers anxious on the deck chair as they sat in awkward silence outside while Rossi interviewed his wife.

Andrea Harris glared at her from under her long lashes, her arms crossed defensively. Inwardly, Prentiss sighed. Good luck prying much out of this one, she thought to herself. “Does your father have a special place? Somewhere he goes when he’s feeling stressed?”

“No,” Andrea gritted out.

“Have you noticed his mood change over the last couple of weeks? Maybe he’s happier? Lighter?”

“No,” she snapped.

“Has anything unusual happened in the last few weeks? Anything at all out of the ordinary.”

“No.”

And on it went. Two hours later, Missy Dewald turned up dead.

They split, again, to piece together what they could of the heretofore unsuspected partner. Gideon and Morgan headed off to interrogation, where William Harris had brought up the race card to rile Morgan, to somewhat successful effect. In his first months with the BAU, Spencer Reid was spending a lot of time hunched over a cheap police desk doing psycholinguistic analysis: the memorabilia of a sexual sadist, so-called suicide notes, now love letters sent from one remorseless sexual sadist to another, which was the second time this had happened in as many years.

Prentiss eyed Jordan, still vulnerable from their last case where it might’ve been _her_ press conference that tipped the unsub over the edge and into a spree, and decided against asking her to accompany her to the Harris household. She took Rossi instead, who tried to wheedle some truth out of the wife while Prentiss once more squared off against the face of teenage sulkiness.

This time, she tried a different tactic. “What were you doing when he was arrested?”

Andrea shot a baleful glance at her, but as Prentiss knew she would, couldn’t resist the opportunity to rub in her face how difficult her life had suddenly become. “He was giving me driving lessons,” she said.

“That’s exciting. I remember when I learned to drive,” Prentiss reminisced, trying to soften Andrea up. “When are you getting your license?”

Andrea’s clenched-fist body language softened, just a little, but enough for Prentiss to feel a thrill of victory. “Next month. Dad said that if I keep my grades up, I can have the car.”

Alarm bells started ringing in her head. Something Gideon had once said about sociopaths and gifts. “He gave you the car?” she probed carefully.

Andrea’s answers were still bouncing around in her head hours later. The cadence of her voice, the stress pulling her words taut and uncompromising. They followed her as Andrea went missing, as her mother railed at her husband for letting it happen, as Morgan relentlessly badgered Harrison about not even lifting a finger to find her. Part of it was that she had disappeared; Prentiss had a victim’s voice echoing in her mind. But part of it was something else, some suspicion that there was more here than one serial killer and his daughter. The sense that she was on the verge of something important.

It wasn’t the case; William Harris cracked and agreed to lead them to the secondary location, if for no other reason than to see his partner one last time. And Prentiss watched Andrea, screaming, in agony now that she was no longer able to deny her father’s crimes, swarm into her mother’s arms and beg her to take them away, without feeling she was any closer to grasping it. As it turned out, she would remember Andrea Harris, the memory of this teenage girl so determined to believe and so scarred by betrayal seared into her synapses. But she wouldn’t understand what she was witnessing, what she was beginning, until much later.

After Florida, Alabama. A child abduction. On cases like these, Prentiss would swear that you could count down the clock by her frantic heart. On the plane, Morgan pointed out that the murders of the parents were carried out with a minimum of fuss.

“They weren’t after the parents,” Prentiss said. “The real target was down the hall.”

She was surprised when Jordan turned burning eyes onto her and snapped, “Her name is _Kate_ ,” though she knew that Jordan had been struggling lately, terrorized by the immense responsibility of her job, of JJ’s job, of the lives on her shoulders. She didn’t miss, however, the way Morgan rested a hand on Jordan’s shoulder. To restrain her, to calm her. To comfort. So, that was a thing. She thought about the money she now owed Reid. It didn’t help.

At the thirty-one hour-mark, Kate Hale was found. Alive. In more or less good health, though suffering from having missed two doses of her epilepsy medication. Prentiss and Rossi swirled into the hospital, confused, elated, apprehensive. The statistics named this a miracle, though in Prentiss’s experience, miracles rarely came free.

Rossi paused at the hospital door. “You should take this one,” he said lowly.

That caught Prentiss as off-guard as Jordan snapping at her on the plane had. Today was a day just full of surprises. She’d interrogated unsubs on her own before, and of course there was her time with JTF-12, which no one, not even Gideon, knew about, but this was the first time she’d handled an interview of this magnitude by herself: a cognitive of a traumatized child, not just another suspect or another witness. She knew why Rossi had suggested it. If Kate had been assaulted, Prentiss would be a comforting presence, any of the men on her team an alarming one, and Jordan certainly couldn’t conduct a cognitive. But she was taken aback by the trust put in her, in her skills, nevertheless.

“Okay,” she said, a little breathlessly, and pushed the door open onto Kate, morose in her hospital bed and tiny in the colorful scrubs they gave to children, and her drunk of a biological father.

Kate Hale would linger with her, too. Her strength. Her determination to see this through, to catch her parents’ killers, that reminded her so of Carrie, the girl from last year who she’d almost adopted. She reflected ruefully that she was collecting girls, daughters of victims and of perpetrators, as she, Rossi and Reid checked out the nearest trailer parks on Kate’s testimony. Rossi charmed information out of the sullen owner like a magician charming water from a stone, and Prentiss wandered off, thinking about unlikely survivals and Eastern European terms of endearment. She wasn’t too far off to hear when Rossi said to Reid, “Jordan was right, you know?”

“Hmm?” Reid said, distracted. They were looking for broken glass now--or something. Prentiss stood in the midst of the RVs and tried to do as Gideon might, to soak in what the unsubs saw every day as they moved in and out of this place, to crawl into their minds through the cracks of the mundane. She also tried not to listen, but she was less than successful at that.

“This job will harden you. It’ll make you forget the horror you once felt, that any decent person would feel. We use language like a shield to protect us from the darkness. We never talk about it head-on.”

Reid tilted his head. “You do. In your books.”

Rossi laughed. It was a terrible laugh. “Do I?”

Prentiss shivered and walked briskly over to join them, cutting the conversation short. However much they might couch what they saw in clinical, bare language--MO, preferential child offender, psychopathology, the 24-hour clock--there was still plenty of horror left in her to shudder at this case, at this family that had slaughtered a little girl’s parents and abducted her, at this nine-year-old boy who was somehow complicit.

The wind screamed cold and barren in her ear. She missed JJ.  
  
  
  
MORGAN  
Whatever Prentiss thought--and Morgan knew she had Thoughts on the matter--he and Jordan were not having sex. They’d had dinner a few times and once, at the end of one of their not-dates, they’d been talking about the Orange County case and Jordan had started crying, big, gulping sobs that wracked her delicate frame and rendered her unable to move, to call out, to explain herself, and so Morgan had walked her home and stayed on her couch and left water on her bedside and had no thoughts about sex at all. The morning after she’d been shy, unlike the spitfire he’d grown used to, but grateful. He’d bought her coffee and a brownie, his own way of saying that everything was already forgotten.

Tonight, though, was Jordan’s last night as their media liaison, and something was different about her. Lighter, but sadder. He’d seen JJ that evening when they got back from arresting a nine-year-old and his parents and given her a huge bear hug that seemed to drain all the tension and the sorrow at this particular case away. Now, at the shoebox of a Cuban place tucked between shops on Quantico’s tiny, suburban main street, Jordan seemed distant. She picked at her pollo quisado while they made what passed for small talk about the case, about little Kate Hale and whether entrusting her to her father had been a good idea, about Lynn Robillard and whether she would ever fully recover from the trauma of having her parents killed, about the boy’s chances of growing up to become a functioning member of society. Finally, Morgan braced himself and leaped headfirst into the subject they’d been dancing around all night: “So how are you feeling about getting back to counterterrorism?”

She studied him for a long moment. Then she said, seemingly apropos of nothing, “Did you always want to be a part of the BAU?”

Morgan considered, aware that whatever came out of his mouth might be the most important thing he said all night. “I’m not like Reid. I didn’t come out of the womb wanting to be a profiler. I was perfectly happy being on Chicago PD’s bomb squad for years. We worked a case with the BAU once, did I ever tell you that? So I knew Gideon. And, you know. I was a young cop, a little awed by the FBI agents who came in and fixed it all. But I never considered making a serious play for that kind of career.”

“So what changed?” Jordan asked.

“The world did.” Morgan set down his fork. “After 9/11… it all felt so small, you know? Getting called out to bomb threats in one city that half the time was just teenagers up to no good. Doing drills over and over again for just one terrible thing that might happen when we had proof that when it came, it might not be a bomb. It might not even be just one terrible thing.” Jordan put her hand over his, as though she could feel the fine tremors of his heart, as though she knew he needed the reinforcement. “I wanted to do something that I knew might have a chance at stopping it. So I joined the FBI.” And started remodeling houses, but that felt almost too personal to share in this new and delicate thing sprouting between them, though Prentiss, and by extension the rest of the team, already knew.

Jordan bit her lip, looking as if she was worrying over something she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to tell him. “Did you know JJ and I were in contention for the same job?”

 _“No,”_ he said, delighted.

“That’s how she knew me. We interviewed together when the BAU added a media liaison to the team. Same class at the FBI Academy, actually.” She smiled bashfully. “She did communications in college, I was in journalism. It always felt like a matter of luck, that she got the job over me. And you know, at the Academy, you hear stories about the BAU, Gideon and Rossi and… well, and you. And JJ knew how I felt about it. So when she asked me to take over for her…”

“You jumped at the chance,” Morgan said, understanding.

“It’s not like I thought it would lead to a permanent job or anything. It’s just… here was my chance. To prove I could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of the best. I just didn’t realize…”

“Jordan, you were great,” Morgan said, and meant it. Whatever her personal feelings about her performance, whatever initial missteps she’d taken, she’d recovered from it all and had never faltered in the field, cool and strong under pressure in the same way JJ was.

“But not as good as JJ,” Jordan said with a wry twist to her mouth.

Morgan hesitated, not sure if he wanted to agree or protest, not sure whether that would be a betrayal of JJ or an outright lie. That seemed to be all the confirmation Jordan needed.

“You know,” she said, her voice softer, “I used to think you were cold. Desensitized to it all.”

“Is this because I interrupted your consult on the first day?” Morgan asked with mock-hurt.

“No,” she said, batting at him. “Come on, I’m trying to tell you something serious here.”

“Sorry, sorry,” he held up his hands in surrender.

“Now I realize--you, all of you--you haven’t built walls and hard shells around yourselves. You open yourself to the pain, to the darkness, every day, you let yourself get cut and bruised. It’s admirable. But I don’t think I could ever do it.”

He squeezed her hand, which he hadn’t let go of. “You don’t have to.”

“I know,” she said. “And us?”

He didn’t stiffen. “What about us?”

She stared him down. The dim lighting of the restaurant sent glints of light dancing through her hair, turning it into a halo, turning her into an angel. “I really like you, Derek.”

Uh-oh. Conversations like this usually ended with sex or a break-up, and for some reason Morgan didn’t think tonight was going to be the night they broke their no-sex streak. “I like you too, Jordan.”

“But this--thing--we’re doing, do you really think it can work? The BAU is so intense. It’s not just what you see, what you do. You--all of you--you practically live out of each other’s pockets. It’s… hard to stay aloof when you’re pressed up against someone like that. How do we know that what we have isn’t just proximity? That it has staying power?”

He looked at her, drank in the sight of her. She was beautiful, of course. But there was something else about her, a fire that had inspired him to break his rule about dating agents, a knowingness that he liked in his women and a wryness that spoke to his own sense of humor. He wasn’t sure if she was The One, if he even believed in the concept of there being a perfect match for everyone, much less himself. But he did like her. And he thought they might be standing on the edge of something great. “I don’t know, Jordan,” he said at last. “But I want to find out.”

She softened. “I kind of do, too,” she confessed. He reached out and grasped her hand, which had slipped out of his sometime during their conversation about methods of coping with the darkness. They didn’t speak for a long time.  
  
  
  
JJ  
They got together to watch the Superbowl at Minnie’s, the somewhat sedate hang-out spot that was the closest thing in Quantico to a nightclub. The bar was overrun with singles from the nearby Army base, the two TVs anchored above it tuned fuzzily to the big game. Rossi, though he’d started the night grumbling that the team should’ve just thrown their own _private_ party at his mansion, now held court over a passel of swooning junior agents. Garcia was getting increasingly loud at the bar.

When the call came in, JJ and Will were dancing, JJ holding one of the Shirley Temples she’d been drinking like a fish all night as if to make up for the fact that she couldn’t drink alcohol with sheer quantity. Prentiss and Reid had been watching, half-impressed, half-disgusted, Morgan dousing the dance floor in pheromones. “I think one of them’s humping his leg,” Prentiss murmured as JJ, apologetic, her face transformed from the lightness of the twenty-something dancing with her boyfriend into Agent Jareau’s serious mien, appeared at their elbows.

JJ pushed aside Will’s pleading, resigned gaze as she watched Morgan extricate himself from the web of women he’d woven around himself somehow. He knew the job. He knew what it meant to her. Even on date nights like these, crystalline in their perfection--even then.

Twenty minutes later, they were gathered around the conference table, Gideon shucking his coat off to join them. JJ had gotten only grimmer as the minutes passed and she now hovered in front of the screen, the first of the disturbing images that had accompanied the file already up.

“Man, how do you solve any crimes when the only things you care about are trains and birdwatching?” Morgan complained good-naturedly. Gideon, of course, had skipped their party for a jaunt at the Smithsonian looking at bird etchings. She wished that was a euphemism.

“I also like chess,” Gideon said mildly. Morgan rolled his eyes.

JJ cleared her throat. Instantly, everyone sat up straighter, as if they could sense the awfulness radiating from the screen. When she had their attention, she said, “Thirty minutes ago, Atlanta PD responded to a double homicide.”

“Thirty minutes ago?” Prentiss asked, eyebrows raised.

“And they’re already calling us in?” Morgan added.

“What did they find at the scene?” Gideon said, ever prescient.

“Dennis and Lacy Kyle. They had been butchered.” JJ didn’t look back to the screen as she clicked through. She could see what was on it written all over her colleagues’ faces. Blood smeared over the bedsheets, the bathroom tile. An unusual amount of blood, even for a team that semi-regularly dealt with cannibalism. The last time they’d seen a scene like this, they’d ended up with a contract killer, Perotta, in custody within twenty-four hours, but not before he’d almost strangled Wells and tortured an FBI agent to death. JJ had an equally bad feeling about this case.

“There’s bloody handprints on her nightgown, but not on his. Suggests Mr. Kyle was killed first,” Morgan said, looking pale but determined. “Makes sense, take out the biggest threat.”

“And he ran her down in the bathroom,” Gideon pronounced. “Boxed in, she had nowhere to go. And he knew it.”

“Look at the slashing pattern of the wounds,” Reid put in. “Deep, no hesitation marks, no sign that he sawed into the vertebrae of the neck or spent any time fumbling for position. Any similar crimes?”

Garcia, who had covered her eyes when the first images flashed onto the screen, now peeked one out to peruse the results she pulled up on her laptop. “No similar… breaking-and-slashing in Georgia. I’ll expand my search.”

“JJ, this is tragic, but it’s just one murder,” Morgan said. “The most likely scenario is that someone in the Kyles’ circle had a psychotic break. That much rage, that much blood, there’s bound to be some physical evidence on the scene. Why’d they call us in to catch this man?”

“Men,” JJ said.

Reid squinted at her. “How do you figure?”

“Because four minutes before the police arrived, this phone call came in to 911.” She clicked. A sound file came up.

A voice hoarse from whispering: _I’m at 1527 Chestnut Drive._ Yes, sir, I know. What’s your emergency? _He thinks they’re too greedy. He’s going to kill them._ I’m sorry, sir, did you say someone is killing someone else? _Yes! He’s going to kill them! He’s going--_

Another voice, calm, even placid. Menace lurking underneath like the shadow of deceptively deep water on a sunny day. _He’s going to punish the sinners that live here._ What? Sir? Hello?

Click. Silence.

“That’s… different,” Prentiss eventually said.

“And concerning,” Gideon said, already standing. “The religious language indicates a mission-based killer.”

“The most dangerous kind,” Rossi grimly agreed.

“And a mission-based killer isn’t going to stop. Until we stop him,” Gideon said. For someone who’d showed up late to the party, he was the first one of them ready to leave, one hand on his go-bag already. The others milled around, collecting case files and throwing on blazers to transform party looks into professional ones, and JJ watched, helpless, caught in her own body, a sinking feeling of dread filling her slowly.

Rossi touched her elbow gently. “You okay?” he asked.

She shook herself out of it forcefully. She’d already been on one case with the team and made a fool out of herself by believing in a psychic, she couldn’t let this--whatever it was--mother’s intuition or--postpartum psychosis--keep her off-center any longer. “Yeah,” she said quietly, “just nervous,” and Rossi seemed to understand and left her alone with whatever anxieties were churning in her gut because she had to leave Henry behind. That must be it. What else would it be?

Standing in a barn, gunshots and the dying screams of dogs still ringing in her ears, she would regret asking that.

She would regret it even more when backup arrived and found her. And didn’t find Reid.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm at [tumblr](http://homoethics.tumblr.com), and I need more Criminal Minds content! Ask / rec me anything, please.


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